It's all part of the Qwen play.

"Too Open"

On August 10, Qwen launched something called the "Qwen Open Platform."

It made me laugh, because the platform is absolutely packed with agents. I figured, it's basically 6026 already — "agents" clearly aren't a new thing anymore. If you're going to make a whole separate thing about them now, there better be something fresh.

Then I took a closer look and realized I'd misunderstood: these aren't the usual chat companions, role-players, or dating simulators. These are built for actual work — KE Holdings, SF Express, 58 Home, plain and practical.

No emotional value, just manual labor. Classic Alibaba AI.

To test whether they actually work, I tried out a few.

01

KE Holdings

First up, KE Holdings.

I've been wanting to move and looking for a rental for months, but haven't signed anything after two or three months of dragging my feet.

Partly because Beijing's rental market is genuinely terrible — finding a place fit for normal human habitation counts as having high standards.

But there's also a paradox built into apartment-hunting apps: if you just use the built-in search, you can only filter by location, floor, orientation — generic stuff.

Things like the view from the window, whether it faces the street, nearby amenities, neighborhood reputation — these non-hard requirements you have to explore one by one, or have a long chat with an agent.

And agents vary wildly in quality. Some talk like they think they're your dad, dripping with condescension, completely ruining your mood. Like this ⬇️

So I've been hoping AI replaces these people ASAP.

I opened the KE Holdings agent in Qwen and sent it the exact same rental requirements I'd sent to an agent.

And then I discovered the beauty of AI: at least it won't lie to me. The agent just told me straight up — I literally can't afford this kind of place 😭

Right, no sweet talk, no mysterious runarounds, just the most direct, most blunt, most straight-to-the-point answer possible.

But honestly, isn't that better than getting bombarded with listings that don't match my needs, then wasting a whole day on viewings?

And it didn't stop there — it gave me some targeted suggestions ⬇️

Either raise your budget, give up on being fancy, buy earplugs, or get rid of your cat. Never mind whether it sounds nice — if it works, it works.

When I chose to ignore my budget, the agent immediately found me several suitable places with detailed explanations.

And there was actual reasoning involved: I never mentioned specific neighborhoods, just said I wanted to live somewhere "trendy," and the agent automatically relocated me near Chaoyang Park.

But this agent doesn't know everything. I later added a requirement that I absolutely had to see the CITIC Tower from my window, and it straight up said it didn't have that capability.

Theoretically, if the agent could connect to KE Holdings' AI property inspection feature, data on views and interior conditions could absolutely be collected. In fact, that's the thing I focus on most when renting, and also the most exhausting part to check.

Looks like this agent hasn't connected to that feature yet, and hasn't unlocked visual capabilities either. If they want to get smarter, this is the piece that needs fixing ASAP.

02

Hello Inc. Car Rental

But Beijing has one advantage — it's close to Hebei. Hebei has lots of internet celebrities, people like Guo Laoshi and Liangzi are all there.

So I opened Hello Inc.'s car rental agent in Qwen and briefly described my needs.

Sure enough, no need to download an app, no worrying about accidentally tapping an ad and getting redirected — just got it done.

And I don't know if it actually factored in Liangzi's physique, but it recommended five- and six-seater cars.

After selecting, you can place the order directly. I'd have actually paid if I weren't broke.

But some issues remain unsolved. For instance, Xianyu wanted to use it to rent a car for a trip to Hong Kong, and the Hello Inc. agent didn't recognize the need for Hong Kong license plates — just threw out a few Shenzhen-plated cars.

Hope they keep improving.

03

58 Home

Then, 58 Home.

This one worked pretty well. I deliberately raised the difficulty, giving myself a persona of "996 every day, working overtime until 10pm, living in a three-bedroom apartment" to see if the 58 Home agent could make reasonable arrangements.

The results were decent — it offered cleaning schedules for weekends or weekday mornings, and also suggested having the cleaner come alone to my place.

Unfortunately I haven't used 58 Home before. If I had, this agent should be able to pull up previous orders and auto-match needs, saving me from explaining every time.

04

SF Express

The most practical one is here. As you all know, we often end up writing apology letters because we like telling the truth. But publishing apologies on our own public account every time — if you think about it, doesn't seem that sincere.

So we've decided to synchronize with handwritten apology letters going forward, mailed directly to specified companies ✌️

This is a long-term project. So we thought of Qwen's SF Express agent to see if it could help us execute this task ⬇️

As you can see, this agent reads the user's SF Express account — address book info can be auto-populated.

But for recipient info and location, it can't do further searches.

Understandable — after all, not everyone has needs as abstract as ours 🥺

But after I manually sent it the recipient info, the SF Express agent placed an order at Lightspeed. Mission accomplished 👍

Finally, I want to say — although this round of testing definitely hit plenty of capability boundaries, some of them quite abstract, I think Qwen building this open platform is a good thing.

The previous AI + lifestyle services approach was aggregating everything into a single homepage chat — ordering bubble tea or calling a car, all in one sentence.

Looked convenient, but had lots of limitations in practice.

Like how Qwen could only connect to Alibaba's own services before, and even some Alibaba services weren't fully integrated. Bringing in external providers took massive costs.

Now Qwen is choosing to decentralize — rather than having its AI act as a visible hand directly controlling everything, it's letting providers build their own agents and plug into Qwen's open platform.

This is obviously good for partners.

After all, not every small business can burn cash building their own AI product features like Meituan did with Xiaomei or DiDi did with DiDi AI. But whipping up an Agent to plug into Qwen's open platform? That's a piece of cake.

And the Agent-ification of apps and mini-programs should become product development consensus after Qwen's move — other domestic AI companies will definitely build their own open platforms too. These partners will spontaneously build their own Agents even if not for Qwen.

So they'll all participate together. Voluntarily becoming part of Qwen's little performance.

Qwen is certainly happy to see this. Let the professionals handle what they're professional at. SF Express knows best how to send packages, KE Holdings knows best how to organize listing data, Hello Inc. knows best how car rental flows work — Qwen is basically an open app store, ready to use.

Damn, closed the loop.

As ordinary users, no need to download 10,086 apps anymore — just talk in Qwen to rent apartments, rent cars, book cleaning, with your account data connected too. Genuinely convenient.

The features are still a bit simple now, but in the future when there are more and more services, you'll just say what you want to do and Qwen will find suitable services itself, stringing together several steps or even several different services. That's when the real service impact will show.

So Qwen, you better keep at it.

The open platform is built. Next you need to give us a reason to use you every day. 🤭

(This article's cover image was generated by ChatGPT; purely human writing)

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