SUPCON Deploys Alibaba's QwenWork AI Agent in Its Marketing

SUPCON's frontline sales staff often spent the day visiting customers and the evening writing materials. At the Hangzhou industrial automation company, a solution proposal could take more than five days, from on-site research to a finished document. That routine is now the first target of QwenWork, the enterprise AI agent product from Alibaba, after the two sides signed a strategic cooperation agreement on October 16.

SUPCON, founded in 1999, calls itself an industrial AI platform company built on industrial data, with large models at its core. It focuses on process industries such as chemicals and petrochemicals and says it serves more than 40,000 customers in over 50 countries and regions. Alibaba opened QwenWork to public beta on August 3, merging its earlier QoderWork, Wukong and MuleRun agents into one workplace platform. It says the product passed 30 million users in its first month, more than half of them enterprises. Changan Automobile, FAW Toyota, Yihai Kerry Arawana and Transfar Group are also named as enterprise users.

The first project covers the full marketing chain, from collecting market leads to final payment collection. With QwenWork handling market research and working from SUPCON's in-house expert knowledge, the company says a proposal now takes about one day, an efficiency gain of roughly five times. Those figures are SUPCON's own, and the sources give no independent measurement of them.

For SUPCON's sales teams, the first beneficiaries, the change is the time between a customer visit and a finished proposal. The longer-term bet is the skill library. SUPCON intends to use QwenWork's skills feature to package years of its sales experience into an AI marketing skill library that other process-industry companies could reuse. It also plans to bring the agent into procurement, supply chain, finance, human resources, R&D and compliance work. No timetable for that wider rollout has been given.

The deal comes as QwenWork's e-commerce edition entered invite-only testing earlier this week, a sign that Alibaba is pushing the product into industry-specific work.