Tencent eyes China’s multibillion dollar healthcare sector with social media and AI models

Tencent Holdings, China’s social media and video gaming giant, is testing its artificial intelligence (AI) capabilities in the healthcare sector, a corporate executive said in an interview.

The internet giant is integrating several of its social media tools including WeCom, the enterprise version of ubiquitous messaging app WeChat, with its in-house large language model (LLM) Hunyuan, to develop industry-specific AI applications for pharmaceutical and healthcare clients such as AstraZeneca, Alexander Ng, president of Tencent Healthcare, told the South China Morning Post at a company event in Shanghai last Friday.

Ng, who worked as deputy director at the Beijing office of the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation before joining the Shenzhen-based tech giant to lead its healthcare unit in 2019, said Tencent’s Next Generation Engagement Suite, designed to connect the pharmaceutical industry with doctors in China, has integrated the abilities of Hunyuan into a medical industry-specific model.

“For many sectors, people are used to relying on transaction results to determine marketing methods, but doctors and pharmaceutical companies are different … what we care about is how to improve their academic understanding of drugs,” said Ng.

“Based on our understanding of this industry, we have built an interactive platform supported by a set of underlying data tools, so that in addition to the universal channels of WeCom and Tencent Meeting, there are more channels for communication,” he said.

Other previous products launched by Tencent Healthcare cover both consumer and business-facing software, such as an AI medical imaging product called Miying, as well as a medical insurance payment service based on WeChat.

The move by the healthcare unit underscores how Tencent is aiming to change the way China’s multibillion healthcare market works, as big tech firms such as Alibaba Group Holding, Baidu and Huawei Technologies also bet on AI to foster the digital transformation of various industries. Alibaba owns the Post.