Alibaba released version 2.0 of Qianwen Office (千问办公), its AI agent for office work, on 9 November. The Chinese technology outlets QbitAI and InfoQ published the company’s press release unchanged. The release describes it as the biggest update since the product launched about three months ago, and all the new features are already available in the Qianwen Office app.

The agent gathers information from several groups

With the Collaboration feature (协作), a team can set up a shared workspace for a project. Users can link DingTalk group chats, documents, spreadsheets and AI-written meeting notes to it. The agent, which the company calls a digital employee, uses these sources as background information. When a team member gives it a task, it drafts a status update, summarises what has been agreed, and creates and tracks tasks. The company said the feature is the first in the industry in which several people and an agent work together.

Pandaily reported that, according to the product documentation, a group administrator must approve the link when an ordinary member links a chat.

In an example from the release, five employees on the coupon team at the Intime department store (银泰百货) previously collected information from the group chats of more than 60 stores and entered it into a spreadsheet by hand. Now the groups and the spreadsheet are linked to the same workspace, and the agent gathers the information and updates the spreadsheet. The company said the workload fell significantly. Pandaily, however, noted that the example gives no measured time saving. Leiphone reported that Intime used the feature in an internal test. More than 200 people are involved in the work, and staff check about 50 details for each group-buying coupon.

Leiphone tried the feature itself: a reporter and an editor simulated brainstorming story ideas with the agent. The agent read interview material saved in the workspace and took both people’s comments into account. Leiphone nonetheless considers this a light use case compared with Intime’s multi-step work.

An event can trigger work

Users can choose an event and write a rule; when the rule is met, the agent starts work. The feature is called Automatic Tasks (自动任务). At first, the triggers are messages from a specified person, @-mentions of the user in a specified group, and approval tasks. Pandaily said the release notes also mention to-do list tasks, and that the feature extends an earlier scheduled-tasks capability. In the release’s example, a regional manager sets a rule: when someone @-mentions the manager in a group and says a product is out of stock, the agent reads the inventory spreadsheet and fills in a transfer request.

With the new co-editing feature, the agent edits the original file based on the user’s comments. Users can add several comments to a document, spreadsheet or slides. A new file space holds both files the agent produces and files the user uploads. Tasks run in the cloud and continue even when the computer is switched off. After granting permission, users can control their computer from their phone. Pandaily said enterprise administrators can switch off remote control.

Prices and user numbers have not been disclosed, and no independent test results on the agent’s accuracy in shared workspaces have been published, Pandaily reported.