“2026 is the year of agent monetization in China,” said Sundeep Gantori, equity strategist at UBS Global Wealth Management CIO on Thursday. As advanced models like Deepseek's R2 become more refined, “we hope to see more monetization,” he added.
AI agents are widely considered to be the next evolutionary stage of generation AI for the world's largest high-tech companies, such as Google and Openai. On Wednesday, German translation startup Deepl said it had launched an AI agent that could complete “repeated, time-consuming tasks across a variety of functions.”
According to Gantori, the US market for AI agents has many applications for coding, asset management and other types of automation, and currently generates approximately US$15 billion to US$20 billion in annual revenue. This is mainly because in the US, companies are used to purchasing and using advanced software, and the AI models used are very sophisticated.
In China, businesses are not used to paying monthly subscriptions to enterprise software, and AI agents focus on the consumer side, from shopping to entertainment.
“We haven't seen it…Money is sufficient in China today because the model isn't there,” he said, adding that things could change next year as the country's leading language models become more refined.
