The Pulse
Tencent Expands WorkBuddy and Previews Hy4 and Hy4 Flash
Tencent says WorkBuddy has handled more than nine billion task requests since launching in March, while previewing upcoming general releases of Hy4 and Hy4 Flash. The company also outlined WorkBuddy’s international expansion and reported gr
AI.info Team · Written with AI · fact-checked ·
Tencent is presenting WorkBuddy as an enterprise agent already used at scale while its next Hy4 models are still awaiting release. In an October 29 corporate announcement about the 2026 Tencent Global Digital Ecosystem Summit, the company said WorkBuddy had handled more than nine billion task requests since launching in March. The announcement was distributed through PR Newswire on October 30. Tencent also previewed the upcoming general release of Hy4 and Hy4 Flash, without announcing release dates or benchmark results for either.
Dowson Tong, Tencent’s senior executive vice president and CEO of its Cloud and Smart Industries Group, said:
“AI is creating new opportunities for businesses, but its real value comes when it can be applied to everyday operations and adopted at scale.”
The announcement couples that pitch with company-reported adoption figures and a plan to take WorkBuddy further into international business workflows.
WorkBuddy adoption figures and an unannounced Hy4 release date
Tencent says WorkBuddy now serves more than 50 industries and has reached 50 percent of China’s top 500 enterprises. Its ecosystem includes more than 50,000 developers and partners, along with over 200,000 listed skills. Those figures indicate the product’s reach, but the announcement does not define task success or explain how Tencent counts requests.
The Hy4 news is less specific on timing. Tencent says the general release will improve performance on long-running and real-world productivity tasks, make reasoning more efficient and add visual understanding. Tencent describes Hy4 Flash as a cost-effective model carrying over Hy4’s visual understanding and agent capabilities; the announcement gives no pricing or release schedule.
WorkBuddy targets the tools international teams already use
For overseas enterprises, WorkBuddy is designed to connect with messaging applications and business systems, letting teams carry out tasks within tools they already use. Customers can select a model for each task, and Tencent says the product includes security controls for enterprise deployment. The company also says it has launched CodeBuddy, WorkBuddy, Miora, its Agent Development Platform, MAGIC AI and Agent Runtime internationally, positioning them as a shared AI workbench for Chinese and international teams.
Tencent Cloud’s TokenHub is a unified platform through which businesses can access Tencent’s Hy models alongside third-party models. The release says customers can choose models based on performance and cost, and manage access, usage, governance and billing in one place. In China, Tencent has introduced Buddy One, a cross-application system that coordinates tasks between WorkBuddy, Tencent office applications and specialized business agents. Together, these products show how Tencent intends to connect its models to workplace software rather than sell model access alone.
Hy4 preview is already public; the next release is not
The coming general release follows Tencent’s August 28 release of Hy4 preview, which the company open-sourced. Tencent’s earlier announcement described that preview as a 770-billion-parameter model with 49 billion active parameters and a context window exceeding one million tokens. Those specifications belong to Hy4 preview; Tencent did not say whether the upcoming general-release Hy4 or Hy4 Flash will share them.
The distinction matters because Tencent is making a product roadmap announcement, not reporting a new model evaluation. The October statement offers capability claims but no comparison results, pricing or technical specifications for the forthcoming versions. That leaves enterprise buyers without the details needed to compare the new releases with other models on cost or measured performance.
Tencent Cloud reports growth across regions
Tencent says its active overseas customer base doubled over the past year and international demand for its AI products and services grew by triple digits. The company also reports serving customers in more than 150 countries and regions, with its infrastructure spanning 25 cloud regions and 70 availability zones. In 2026, it expanded capacity in locations including Frankfurt, Osaka, Riyadh, Malaysia, Mexico and Thailand.
Those figures frame WorkBuddy’s international push as part of a larger cloud expansion, though they are company-reported measures rather than independent adoption or performance assessments. The next concrete test is the general release Tencent has promised: the company has yet to provide a date, prices or benchmark data for Hy4 and Hy4 Flash.