At half past seven on the evening of 2 November, a product nobody can see went into the shopping cart of China’s most-watched livestream. The item was a monthly membership for Qwen Office, Alibaba’s workplace AI product, priced at one fen and limited to one per new account. It sold 100,000 units in half an hour.
That works out to RMB 1,000 of revenue and an announced 2 trillion tokens of AI quota. The card’s list price is RMB 28.
Why the token number does not add up
Take the claim at face value and each buyer received 20 million tokens. The published entitlement is different: the base tier grants 500 credits a month, and with promotional and new-user allowances the realistic figure lands between 800 and 900. A card worth a few hundred credits cannot contain 20 million tokens.
The industry convention is roughly 0.6 tokens per Chinese character, which would put 2 trillion tokens near 3.3 trillion characters. The China Academy of Information and Communications Technology recorded average daily token consumption in China of 500 trillion as of June 2026, so the livestream’s half hour would represent four thousandths of one national day.
The distinction the seller is relying on is that a quota is a bookkeeping unit while consumption is the actual cost. Allocating an allowance costs nothing until somebody uses it. Buying 100,000 registered, phone-verified accounts inside a membership system costs one fen each and buys something a token count cannot: a user who has already paid, however little.
The executive standing next to the host
The more revealing detail is who stood beside Li Jiaqi. Chen Yusen, born in 1992 and a graduate of Zhejiang University’s Chu Kechen honours college, founded the enterprise security firm Chaitin Technology in 2014, sold it to Alibaba Cloud in 2019, and became chief executive of DingTalk on 11 June this year, the youngest business unit CEO in Alibaba’s history. In July the company merged three agent product lines into the Qwen Office division under him, and in September he added the title of Alibaba Group vice president.
A month before the livestream he was on stage at the Yunqi conference presenting enterprise context, a product about embedding agents into inquiry handling, quotation and contract approval. The reference customers were Yihai Kerry Arawana, FAW Toyota, China Unicom Data and Fangda Partners. A month later he was selling one-fen memberships and answering questions about whether he could build an AI twin to chat with fans.
Both audiences are real. The gap is that consumer attention arrives in an afternoon while enterprise sales take quarters, and a division four months old has to report on both.
The demand picture explains the urgency. QuestMobile counted 167 million monthly active users for Qwen in June against 382 million for ByteDance’s Doubao. Engagement diverges further: 17.1 per cent of Qwen’s installed base was active in the first quarter against 33.5 per cent for Doubao, and monthly sessions per user ran 19.8 against 54.8. The distance between installing an app and using it is the market Qwen Office is chasing.
Hardware is the second half of the strategy. Tmall said 70 PC models carrying Qwen Office will debut this Double 11 with up to three months of membership included. Tmall’s 3C general manager Si Dengyu described the bundle as a second growth curve, where hardware stops earning only a distribution spread and starts collecting subscription revenue afterwards.
The counter-evidence is in the same data set. Reporters checking Double 11 token products found most priced at parity with the official store, with no promotional discount and shop volumes in the low hundreds. The RMB 28 tier does not move outside a livestream.
The 100,000 units were bought with a one-fen price, not grown from demand.
Editor’s note: This is an adapted translation of the original OFweek report. It has been trimmed and restructured for readability for an international business audience. The full original (in Chinese) is at https://www.ofweek.com/ai/2026-11/ART-201713-8120-30710070.html.