"3 billion yuan Spring Festival treat plan!" "Share the link to your friends and grab another 1 billion yuan of subsidies!"... The Spring Festival is approaching, and the "red envelope war" led by many Internet giants is on. Unlike previous years, this year's Spring Festival red envelope battle is no longer limited to traditional methods such as mobile payment and e-commerce diversion, but is now fully shifting towards the competition for AI entrance traffic. On January 25th, Tencent issued a notice regarding the distribution of 1 billion yuan in cash during the Spring Festival. The Spring Festival event was launched on February 1st, and users received 1 billion yuan in cash red envelopes on the Yuanbao APP. Tencent CEO Ma Huateng expressed his hope that this red envelope event can recreate the WeChat red envelope moment of 11 years ago, allowing everyone to relive the joy of grabbing red envelopes, and also hoping to accelerate the pursuit of industry leaders. On the same day, Baidu announced the launch of the "500 million yuan red envelope plan": from January 26 to March 12, users can use the "Wenxin Assistant" in the Baidu app to have the opportunity to grab a total of 500 million yuan in cash red envelopes. On February 2nd, Alibaba's Qianwen announced a 3 billion yuan "Spring Festival Invitational Plan". Starting from February 6th, large red envelopes will be posted on the Qianwen app, allowing customers to book milk tea and coffee, movie tickets, plane tickets, hotel and scenic spot tickets, and participate in promotional activities such as free admission. Some people believe that behind the "red packet war", the strategic focus of the Internet giants is shifting from pure traffic competition to the competition of the next generation human-computer interaction portal and intelligent service ecology. Li Mingtao, an expert of the National E-Commerce Demonstration City Expert Committee, analyzed that with the rapid development of AI tools, AI agents, embodied intelligence and other technologies, AI interaction is becoming a new Internet application portal. In the future, whoever's AI occupies the user's mind is likely to win. "Although the focus of each AI is different, the key role and strategic value of AI in the ecology of major Internet enterprises are reflected behind it, and they hope to use and further strengthen their respective ecological advantages. ”Li Mingtao said. The effect of the activity has shown initial signs. Since the launch of the Spring Festival event on February 1st, the daily call volume of Yuanbao AI's image generation function has increased by 30 times, and the daily usage time of Yuanbao by users has increased by over 80%. On the first day of its launch, Baidu Wenxin Assistant attracted over a million participants. As of February 1st, 50 million people have participated in Wenxin Assistant's AI red envelope grabbing. On February 6th, the first day of the "Spring Festival 3 billion yuan free order" event on the Qianwen APP was launched, and user participation was booming. In just 9 hours of launch, users placed over 10 million AI orders through Qianwen. Amidst the wave of enthusiasm, a question arises: are the users attracted by red envelopes the "deep residents" who can settle down, or the short-term tourists who leave immediately after receiving them? Ouyang Rihui, Vice President of the China Internet Economics Research Institute of the Central University of Finance and Economics and Vice President of the China Marketing Association, believes that red packet marketing can stimulate new users in the short term, but the establishment of lasting stickiness must return to the product and ecology itself. AI competition is not only about acquiring traffic, but also a concentrated test of deep technological capabilities such as multimodal interaction, personalized services, and industry empowerment. ”Ouyang Rihui said. At present, apps such as Yuanbao, Doubao, and Qianwen are mostly independent apps, and users have fixed usage habits in daily high-frequency scenarios such as chatting, shopping, and payment. Whether AI services can truly be embedded in life and provide stable and reliable experiences still needs time to test. The peak traffic also poses challenges to the system's carrying capacity. On February 6th, after the launch of the "3 billion yuan free Spring Festival" campaign on the Qianwen APP, some users reported server lag issues. Coordinating internal resources and merchant resources to ensure smooth and stable systems has become an urgent task for platform enterprises. Pan Helin, a member of the Information and Communication Economy Expert Committee of the Ministry of Industry and Information Technology, suggested that Internet enterprises can improve the reuse rate by creating differentiated applications, and the key to differentiation is scene differences, which requires enterprises to do a good job in product positioning. Industry insiders say that this Spring Festival "red envelope battle" is the first time that AI applications have moved from chat interaction to large-scale interaction with the real world. The entrance dispute is only superficial, and the industry should pay more attention to the authenticity of the demand behind the entrance. The retention battle after the "red envelope war" tests whether platforms can transform short-term attention brought by subsidies into long-term dependence for users by deeply cultivating specific scenarios and building efficient value loops. For major AI applications, the challenge has just begun. When the smoke of the "red envelope war" dissipates, what remains in the user's phone should not only be the "best luck" in memory, but also a truly useful and easy-to-use intelligent assistant. (New Society)