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Chinese fintech firm Ant Group, an affiliate of Alibaba Group Holding, has picked healthcare as a new artificial intelligence-driven business pillar, as it seeks growth in China’s rapidly ageing society, according to CEO Cyril Han Xinyi. The group, which owns and operates the payment service Alipay, has been struggling to find new areas for growth after Beijing imposed regulatory requirements on its consumer-credit businesses. Ant has also restructured to run independently from Alibaba, with chairman Jack Ma ceding his role as Ant’s actual controller. Alibaba owns the Post. “In the age of AI, Ant focuses on real-world applications and targets three major service sectors: everyday consumer services, financial services and healthcare services,” Han said in a letter to employees on Friday. He added that the company aimed to quickly establish healthcare “as a strategic pillar”, as AI was a key to “tackling society’s most pressing healthcare challenges”. The elevation of the healthcare business marked one of the most significant pivots for Ant since its cancelled initial public offering in Shanghai and Hong Kong five years ago, which signalled a changing economic and regulatory landscape. Ant Group now has five core business groups: Alipay, digital payments, wealth and insurance, credit and healthcare. In addition, the group conducted an internal carve-up last year to create overseas business arm Ant International, innovation-focused Ant Digital Technologies and database operation OceanBase as independent entities. Zhang Junjie, a long-time executive in Ant’s healthcare division, is president of the new healthcare business group. Ant first ventured into the healthcare sector about a decade ago, offering services such as hospital appointment booking and payment, as well as digital certificates for the country’s healthcare insurance system. The company has stepped up its healthcare push in recent years with the help of AI. In early 2025, it acquired Haodf, an online consultation platform that connected patients with doctors. The deal enabled Ant to launch an AI assistant to help 290,000 doctors on the platform with tasks such as managing medical records, the company said. It launched a stand-alone app dubbed AQ in June, which was formerly a mini-program within Alipay. The app offers services including doctor recommendations, medical report analysis and personalised advice, and connects users to digital services from thousands of hospitals. The platform had served 140 million users as of September, company data showed. It ranked among China’s top seven AI-native apps by monthly active users, and was the only healthcare application on the list, according to industry researcher QuestMobile. AQ is powered by Ant’s Healthcare Large Model, built on foundation models including DeepSeek’s R1 and V3, Alibaba’s Qwen and Ant’s self-developed BaiLing. The company said the model achieved industry-leading results in domestic and international medical benchmarks such as HealthBench and MedBench. Ant has also been helping hospitals develop user-facing applications. Angel, an AI agent developed in collaboration with public medical institutions in southeastern China’s Zhejiang province, had served more than 1,000 medical facilities, handling more than 50 million user interactions, the company said.
