China's mutual-fund industry has quietly shifted its AI race from "having" the technology to actually "using" it. China Fund News reported on November 7 that E Fund upgraded its Buddy app with an "AI investment companion team" of five AI experts, covering fund research, index analysis, news tracking and investor education. Changxin, Aegon-Industrial and Southern, among others, have been putting their own agents onto Tencent's WorkBuddy desktop agent platform.
So what does E Fund's five-expert lineup actually do? A general fund assistant answers market questions and builds custom plans. An index officer breaks down index comparisons, a research aide produces fund comparison and deep-analysis reports, and an intelligence officer assembles personalized dashboards. The fifth, an education coach, offers tailored courses and self-tests. The company said every answer is drawn from its official content library and can be traced to sources.
Each WorkBuddy entrant took a different angle. Changxin distilled its offering into three frameworks, a market compass, an excess-return stabilizer and a wealth guardian, mapping onto hotspot reviews, product analysis and holding companionship. Every reply is stamped with source and date. Aegon-Industrial's assistant leans toward market observation, fund interpretation and companionship, wiring fund search, historical performance and disclosed holdings into AI-callable data services via MCP and skill configuration. Southern went wider, with an agent spanning five expert modules that cover 25 typical scenarios built on 13 professional capabilities — it can objectively compare 2 to 5 user-selected candidate funds.
Two routes now run in parallel across the industry. One packs research content and tools into external platforms such as WorkBuddy, Doubao and Qwen to face investors directly. The other builds in-house agents embedded in research, operations, compliance and customer service, where humans make the calls and systems keep the audit trail. Huaxia, Fullgoal, China Universal, Bosera, Huaan and Zhong Ou funds are on the list as well.
As China Fund News frames it, the next round of the race will be decided not by the technology itself but by how well knowledge organization, engineering delivery and data governance are coordinated.