Buddy One Is Officially Live. Tencent Is Using WorkBuddy to Connect Its Entire Product Suite.

While scrolling through WeChat Moments last night, I saw a friend post an image about WorkBuddy.

So I clicked through to take a look. After reading it, all I could say was: wow. WorkBuddy seems to be playing a much bigger game, and its standing within Tencent has already gone through the roof.

They’ve launched something called Buddy One.

Simply put, Buddy One bundles Tencent’s WorkBuddy, Tencent Meeting, Tencent Docs, ima, and Tencent Cloud Drive together, fully linking their account systems.

After digging into the details, I found that Buddy One actually has two layers. Their explanation isn’t particularly clear, and it’s a little confusing.

Let me explain the two layers in detail: Buddy One ID and Buddy One VIP.

Let’s start with Buddy One ID.

It’s free. Think of it as using WorkBuddy to connect Tencent products like Tencent Docs and Tencent Meeting. Any user can link their accounts without purchasing a paid membership.

Once linked, your accounts across these Tencent products share a fully unified identity, along with shared credits. It also allows knowledge and materials across these different Tencent products to start flowing between them.

For various historical reasons, these products have operated independently, so we need to link them manually the first time.

You can start by visiting the official website:

https://www.workbuddy.cn/buddyone/

Then click the Join Buddy One button.

A pop-up will appear showing all the initially supported products. You can link them all in one go and receive 100 bonus credits.

Of course, you can also do this directly in WorkBuddy by linking your accounts from your profile page.

The benefits of linking are simple. First, the credits can be used across products.

Here’s an example.

Previously, using AI in WorkBuddy consumed WorkBuddy credits.

If you opened Tencent Docs and used the AI assistant within its own interface, that consumed your Tencent Docs allowance.

Then, if you opened ima and used its AI features, that consumed ima’s own compute allowance.

Even though all three products could connect to WorkBuddy through connectors, their memberships, credits, and billing systems remained separate.

Buddy One now addresses that.

After joining Buddy One, WorkBuddy credits become shared credits that can be used across four products: WorkBuddy, Tencent Docs, ima, and Tencent Cloud Drive.

For example, if I run a quick task in Tencent Docs now, you’ll see that the credits it consumes are drawn from the same pool as WorkBuddy.

They’ve also connected the data at the account level.

However, based on my own testing, the integration is still somewhat limited. After linking your accounts, you only get read access. In other words, WorkBuddy can read your data in Tencent Docs, Tencent Meeting, and ima, but whenever it needs to write data or perform certain actions, it still has to use the connectors within WorkBuddy, meaning MCP.

Although this first release of Buddy One doesn’t support many products, I think it already shows how much importance Tencent places on WorkBuddy internally.

Tencent is also taking this opportunity with WorkBuddy to seriously address the long-standing fragmentation between these products.

Something many people may not know is that after selecting multiple WeChat messages, you can forward them to a third-party app for processing. WorkBuddy has its own dedicated option, making it the most convenient entry point.

Of course, you can also tap the option to choose an app on your phone and send them to something like ChatGPT. But the integration isn’t as smooth, and it takes an extra tap, making it slightly more cumbersome.

When you tap WorkBuddy, it launches the WorkBuddy app on your phone and automatically brings in those chat records and messages. You can then process them however you like.

And it isn’t limited to phones. The coolest part is that it also works in desktop WeChat.

I don’t think I need to explain just how convenient that is. And on desktop, only WorkBuddy is supported. I have almost every major agent installed locally, but desktop WeChat doesn’t support any of them except WorkBuddy.

Everyone knows how difficult it is to export WeChat chat histories and context.

WorkBuddy is one of the few officially supported products that lets you send an entire chat history to an agent with one click for further processing.

In our case, a lot of our external communication, including conversations with brands and bloggers, happens on WeChat. That’s almost unavoidable. So these days, I often use WorkBuddy with the Feishu connector to process my WeChat chat data, then save the results, such as multidimensional tables, documents, and emails, to Feishu.

One use case I particularly love and use often is having it schedule things for me.

I select the messages between a friend and me in one go, forward them to WorkBuddy, and say, “Add this itinerary to my Feishu calendar.”

It then calls the Feishu connector.

In less than a minute, it’s done.

We can see it right there in Feishu Calendar.

It feels so good, and there are so many more ways to use it.

This may be the first time that, within WeChat, information in chat histories that previously could only be read by people has a chance to become tasks an agent can execute directly.

There’s no getting around it: WeChat holds so much context.

Even a giant like WeChat has opened a door for WorkBuddy. While it hasn’t yet reached the level of a sweeping, built-in integration, Buddy One’s launch already gives us a sense of Tencent’s determination.

They’re starting with products like Tencent Docs, Tencent Meeting, ima, and Tencent Cloud Drive, moving forward and connecting them little by little.

It’s easy to see a future where WorkBuddy brings together all of Tencent’s products, connects everything, and takes them to a whole new level.

Alongside Buddy One’s launch, WorkBuddy has also officially introduced its own premium membership: the Buddy One VIP we mentioned at the beginning.

This VIP membership is essentially the previous Flagship plan: 700 yuan a month with an allowance of 50,000 credits. But this time, you get more for the same price, with Tencent Meeting Pro, Tencent Docs Plus, and 1 TB of Tencent Cloud Drive storage included.

Since I mostly use Claude and Codex, WorkBuddy mainly helps me handle things on WeChat. And because DeepSeek-V4.1-Flash-1017 is ridiculously economical and ridiculously capable, I only subscribe to the 70-yuan Standard plan. It includes 4,000 credits, plus 100 credits for checking in each day, which adds up to another 3,000 credits over a month. That’s generally enough for me. But if you’re a heavy user, Buddy One VIP is well worth a look. It’s a pretty fair deal.

This update makes it quite clear that WorkBuddy’s standing within Tencent may already be very high.

At least judging by the publicly visible product developments, it’s receiving support from more and more Tencent products.

And this series of changes has put a very bold idea in my head.

Tencent’s first era belonged to QQ.

Back then, the most important thing on the internet was connecting people.

QQ solved the problem of connecting people in the PC internet era.

Tencent’s second era belonged to WeChat.

With the arrival of the mobile internet, WeChat gradually extended those connections into everyday life.

Large parts of our digital lives that had previously been scattered across different places were brought together.

These days, we often open WeChat for reasons that have nothing to do with chatting.

WeChat became an enormous gateway.

And now, as agents gain the ability to carry out real tasks and begin connecting everything through those tasks, we can already see a third kind of gateway emerging on the internet.

So QQ connects people, WeChat connects everyday life, and WorkBuddy is beginning to try to connect tasks.

Tencent’s third era really might belong to WorkBuddy.

Everyone is talking about the so-called personal agent.

In China, I think that without WeChat, no personal agent can truly be called a personal agent.

But it seems WorkBuddy might qualify.

Connecting everything Tencent has to offer.

Who knows? Perhaps the next time WorkBuddy’s personal agent bursts onto the scene, it will take the form of an all-unifying Buddy One.

Let’s wait and see.

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