How China’s all-in-one platforms are reshaping the AI battlefield
The super-integration capability of Chinese internet giants was never previously seen as a competitive advantage over their US counterparts, until the artificial intelligence era. With the widespread enterprise adoption of large AI models since 2024, this strength has taken the spotlight, says technology expert Yin Ruizhi.
Chinese and American internet giants show significant divergence in their approaches to cross-industry integration. US companies tend to focus on building technological moats within their core domains. For example, Meta is deeply rooted in the social ecosystem; Google leverages its advantage in search algorithms; and Amazon builds upon its strength in e-commerce and logistics.
This creates a professionalised model of “single-point breakthroughs and deep vertical cultivation”. This approach is shaped both by the strict antitrust regulations in the US and by the broad global market reach of American tech firms; thanks to their early-mover advantage, expanding overseas is significantly less costly for them compared with their Chinese counterparts.
Advantages of super-integration
In contrast, Chinese internet giants generally adopt a “traffic-driven, closed-loop ecosystem” strategy. ByteDance, for instance, uses short video platforms as the entry point and expands horizontally into areas such as e-commerce (TikTok Shop) and office applications (Feishu/Lark). Tencent builds vertically on its WeChat social network by integrating gaming, payments and enterprise services. Meanwhile, Alibaba revolves around its core e-commerce business and constructs a full industry chain ecosystem including logistics (Cainiao), cloud computing (Alibaba Cloud) and finance (Ant Group).
This capability of Chinese internet giants for super-integration was never previously seen as a competitive advantage over their US counterparts, until the AI era.
This kind of diversified layout is supported both by a previously lenient policy environment — the Chinese government once actively encouraged platform-based economic expansion through its “Internet Plus” strategy — and by the need for companies to cope with the intense competition in the domestic market. To maintain their traffic moats — competitive advantage to protect their user base and engagement, firms sought to meet user needs across the entire lifecycle.
Tencent, one of China’s earliest internet giants, became infamous for its “do everything” approach, aggressively expanding from messaging (QQ) into gaming, payments, and even security tools. This sprawling ambition put it on a collision course with rivals like Qihoo 360, an antivirus provider. When Tencent launched QQ Doctor — a security tool competing directly with Qihoo’s flagship product — Qihoo struck back by labelling QQ as “spyware”, accusing it of improperly scanning user data.
However, today, the three major Chinese tech players — ByteDance, Alibaba and Tencent — all possess full-industry-chain tools that span e-commerce, IM and office automation (OA) software.
This capability of Chinese internet giants for super-integration was never previously seen as a competitive advantage over their US counterparts, until the AI era. With the widespread enterprise adoption of large AI models since 2024, this strength has taken the spotlight.
Retrieving information across systems
A critical frontier in AI development is enterprise search — a technology that enables employees to retrieve company information instantly using natural language queries. Unlike traditional keyword-based searches, AI-powered systems understand context, intent and even internal jargon, turning scattered data (documents, emails, databases) into actionable insights.
Imagine the following scenario. The owner of a toy manufacturer asks their staff: “Our toy A was previously promoted by influencer X. What were the terms of that collaboration? Who was responsible for it internally, and why have recent sales dropped significantly? I also saw some online comments saying the product quality has declined — what’s going on?”
These are a few simple questions related to the sales of a manufactured product. However, to answer them accurately, the query cuts across at least three separate internal systems and departments.
... employees at surveyed firms spend an average of 15-20% of their working time just on acquiring and communicating such information. This 15-20% is a clear cost that can be reduced and an efficiency gain to be unlocked.
First: marketing, sales and promotion systems. Influencer marketing involves coordination between e-commerce platforms and social media, as well as user feedback.
Second: internal OA (Office Automation) systems. This includes information about who was the project manager responsible for this product line.
Third: enterprise resource planning (ERP) systems. This covers quality control and product management.
In traditional enterprise management, it is impossible for one employee to operate and navigate all systems. As a result, when trying to resolve complex issues like those mentioned earlier, employees often need to collaborate with colleagues responsible for operating and maintaining the different systems.
Take the order management system, a familiar example for most. A standard e-commerce order system alone typically involves hundreds of commonly used features. This is why key personnel transitions often require handover periods of a month or more, because such employees have knowledge of complex systems, and even if others have access rights, the learning curve to fully understand and efficiently operate those systems remains high.
Now, if an AI assistant could communicate naturally with all these systems, help authorised employees retrieve relevant information, and train new employees without reservation on how to use the systems, such a tool would represent a quantum leap in internal communication efficiency and workforce agility.
... if a company’s e-commerce data, order system, internal messaging platform and OA tools are owned by different internet giants, the competitive walls and lack of interoperability between these ecosystems pose major barriers.
Magic of integrated systems
According to research from a ByteDance-affiliated e-commerce company, employees at surveyed firms spend an average of 15-20% of their working time just on acquiring and communicating such information. This 15-20% is a clear cost that can be reduced and an efficiency gain to be unlocked.
However, if a company’s e-commerce data, order system, internal messaging platform and OA tools are owned by different internet giants, the competitive walls and lack of interoperability between these ecosystems pose major barriers. Even if such an AI were developed, its iteration and upgrades would face significant constraints.
If all these systems belong to the same internet giant, integration would be exponentially faster, which is happening right now.
In today’s escalating US-China trade war, China’s labour cost advantage has long disappeared, and Chinese exporters are now also burdened by tariff disadvantages. Yet China’s exports continue to grow.
The fundamental reason lies in the continuously improving production efficiency of Chinese domestic enterprises. And behind this transformation, China’s internet giants are playing a pivotal role in leveraging their powerful integrative capabilities to further drive AI-led transformation and evolution in the country’s manufacturing sector.
