The century-old Chinese cosmetics company has become a testing ground for corporate artificial intelligence agents. In April, Tencent Smart Retail, in collaboration with the IT and HR teams of Shanghai Jahwa, launched a pilot project called WorkBuddy—an AI-powered office agent from Tencent. After several months, the implementation became routine: WorkBuddy now covers nine business units, including supply chain, branding, R&D, finance, human resources, and IT, increasing average employee productivity by over 4.5 times.
Usage data from the last month shows that the agent is used not only for drafting documents and presentations. Approximately 67% of users apply WorkBuddy for specialized vertical work, 63% for data processing and analysis, and 57% for automation and operational tasks.
R&D teams use the tool to develop cosmetic formulations and conduct regulatory research; the finance department automates reimbursement verification rules and prepares investment evaluation reports; HR notes incomplete probationary reviews; the supply chain updates production dashboards daily; and marketing uses it to gain consumer insights and generate content.
A supply chain example demonstrates the depth of capabilities. Jahwa's B2C business is present on Tmall, JD, and Douyin platforms, with warehouse, processing, and delivery costs distributed across seven types of accounts, totaling about 60 million lines over 18 months. Previously, the logistics team handled this task in spreadsheets, and each monthly review took five to six working days. An operations manager, an economics graduate without coding skills, broke down the process into stages so that WorkBuddy could create Python scripts, which were then validated against the 18-month history and packaged into reusable skills.
As a result, the monthly account analysis was reduced from two working days to 15 minutes, one visualization from three minutes, and the entire monthly cycle to less than 20 minutes, with one task accelerating by 150 times. This practice extends to the work culture: employees share skills, allowing competencies from one department to be used in another, and one team converted weekly PPT reviews into HTML pages accessible to the entire company.
For Tencent, this case highlights a broader idea: corporate agents benefit not by replacing jobs, but by enabling subject matter experts who do not require programming skills to delegate routine work and transform their workflows into ready-made products.