Alibaba's Qwen App partners with China Eastern Airlines for AI-powered flight booking

Alibaba Adds China Eastern Flight Booking to Flagship Qwen App

Alibaba Group Holding Ltd.'s Qwen AI app now helps users book China Eastern Airlines Corp. flights directly, the first time it's opened its agentic AI technology to a major commercial partner. Users can find and book flights using natural-language commands rather than the traditional on-screen interface, Alibaba said on Thursday. Qwen will be able to handle steps like ticketing, seat selection and check-in via chat, the company said in a statement. It'll also offer to calculate commute time to the airport and book a car based on traffic conditions. Alibaba is bundling its consumer-facing artificial intelligence products into Qwen, a do-everything app that that e-commerce pioneer hopes to build into a platform for services, transactions and proactive user support. "Integrating China Eastern marks the first time our agentic capabilities are available to external partners," said Jia Wu, president for Qwen. "Traditional menu-driven interfaces constrain how people express what they actually want." Alibaba expects the agentic support to help generate "entirely new" kinds of demand, Wu added. Its move comes days after Starbucks Corp. introduced a test version of a mini app inside OpenAI's ChatGPT. The premise from Starbucks is that the chatbot would help inspire a drink choice based on the mood a user is in, pushing to give options beyond the familiar menu list.

Alibaba's Qwen Partners With China Eastern Airlines on Agent Experience

Alibaba Group's consumer-facing AI application, Qwen App, has partnered with China Eastern Airlines, marking the first time the app is offering its AI agent features through an external collaboration. Users can now manage the full airline travel process, from search and ticketing to seat selection and check-in, within a single chat in the app, removing the need to juggle multiple platforms, the Hangzhou-based company said in a statement. The Qwen app will continue to add partners both within and outside the Alibaba ecosystem to expand its agentic use cases, Alibaba said. Chinese tech companies are ramping up efforts to improve its model's agent ability and expand AI agent's application scenarios. Alibaba has been aggressively using subsidies to expand its Qwen's user base, such as offering free milk tea coupons on the app to encourage users to place orders through the app.