--- title: "China Mobile's AI assistant passed 100 million monthly users" date: 2026-10-03 category: AI in Action site: NeuroAI canonical: https://neuroai.site/a/na-app-china-mobile-lingxi language: en --- # China Mobile's AI assistant passed 100 million monthly users > China Mobile's 灵犀 (Lingxi) assistant crossed 100 million monthly active users by end of 2025, becoming one of the largest consumer AI deployments in the country — what it does, and where the model still falters. The call used to start with ten minutes of menu prompts and a transferred line. Now a voice answers on the first ring and already knows why you phoned. You describe the problem in plain words, and the plan changes before you hang up. China Mobile (中国移动) is not the company people name when they talk about Chinese AI (人工智能). It is a carrier — a billion-plus SIM cards, towers, bandwidth. Yet its consumer assistant, **灵犀 (Lingxi)**, has become one of the largest real-world deployments of a large model (大模型) facing ordinary users, not engineers. ## The assistant that crossed 100 million At the end of 2025, **灵犀 (Lingxi)** reported more than **100 million monthly active users**, according to state broadcaster CNR (中央广播电视总台) reporting on the company's results in March 2026. That places it among the biggest consumer AI products in the country by active reach. The gateway is the **China Mobile app (中国移动APP)**, which itself passed **300 million monthly active users** in September 2025. Inside that app, 灵犀 is not a chatbot bolted on for show. Reported figures from the app team describe it running **more than 200 scenario services**, logging **over 450 million effective interactions** in a year, and directly completing **5.34 million business transactions** — things like plan changes and add-on purchases that used to require a human agent. ## What 灵犀 actually handles The assistant is built on a decision engine called **MoMA** and a main-sub agent architecture, which together let it do three things a menu tree cannot: - **Routine servicing:** check the bill (查账单), switch a plan (办套餐), top up, or find a store — the high-frequency tasks that flood the 10086 hotline. - **Messy intent:** understand "help me pick a Huawei phone" or "how many AI beans (AI豆) do I have left" — queries with no fixed form, where the model has to infer the goal. - **Transactional follow-through:** move from answer to action, completing the change rather than just describing it. That last part is the difference between a demo and a deployment. An assistant that can only talk is a toy; one that can file the request is infrastructure. ## The model underneath — 九天 (Jiutian) Powering 灵犀 is China Mobile's own foundation model, **九天 (Jiutian)**, upgraded to version 3.0 and, per the company's 2025 results, ranked first on the OpenCompass leaderboard at one point in the cycle. The carrier also says the Jiutian customer-service model runs across all **31 of its provincial companies**, processing **more than 100 million requests a day** and raising problem-resolution rates by around **40%** — though those service-desk figures come from the vendor's own technical write-ups rather than an independent audit. The strategic logic is simple. China Mobile reported **2025 operating revenue of RMB 1,050.2 billion (about US$148 billion / HK$1.15 trillion)**, with **1.005 billion mobile customers** and **642 million 5G customers**. When you already serve a billion people, an assistant that deflects even a fraction of contacts pays for itself in reduced call-center load — and the company counts **over 80,000 "digital employees" (数智员工)** across its internal operations. ## Why a carrier, not a startup, owns this Most consumer AI in China lives inside super-apps — payments, shopping, messaging. China Mobile's edge is different: it owns the billing relationship and the support burden. Every plan change, every complaint, every roaming question is a transaction it already had to staff. An assistant that absorbs the routine calls turns a cost center into a product surface. That is why a telco, not a lab, ended 2025 with 100 million monthly users on an AI assistant. The model did not have to be the smartest in the world. It had to be good enough to answer the bill question at 2 a.m. ## Honest limitations - The **100 million MAU** figure is from CNR's report on China Mobile's March 2026 results; it is a company-reported metric, not independently audited, and "monthly active" definitions vary by product. - The **450 million interactions / 5.34 million transactions** on the app come from the app team's own 2025 retrospective, not external verification. - The **Jiutian 31-province, 100M-requests-a-day, +40% resolution** claims originate in a partner-published technical article, not a third-party study; treat them as vendor-stated. - A 100-million-user assistant still routes hard, ambiguous, or high-value cases to humans. "Deflects routine" is not "replaces the contact center." - OpenCompass rankings move weekly; a "first place" claim is a snapshot, not a durable ranking. ## What readers can do now - **If you are a China Mobile user, actually use 灵犀 for one routine task** — a plan change or a bill question — and note whether it resolves it without a transfer. That is the only real test of a 100-million-user claim. - **If you run a support operation, benchmark against the 40% deflection pattern**, not the headline user count. The number that matters is how many contacts close without a human. - **Track the MAU against the app's 300 million base.** If 灵犀 stays stuck at a third of active users, it is a feature; if it climbs toward the majority, it is the interface. --- Published by NeuroAI (https://neuroai.site/) — https://neuroai.site/a/na-app-china-mobile-lingxi Free to quote with attribution and a link to the original.