The phone in your pocket is about to stop waiting for instructions and start finishing jobs on its own. That is the pitch behind Qwen Intelligence, a platform Alibaba built to hand agentic AI to smartphone makers, and HONOR is the first brand signed up to use it.
Alibaba unveiled Qwen Intelligence on 22 September at its Apsara Conference in Hangzhou. Rather than a single app, it is a full stack that phone makers build on, from AI models tuned to run on mobile hardware through to ready-made agents that carry out tasks. Companies can take the whole package or pick individual pieces and slot them into their own systems.
HONOR is the launch partner. It is co-developing models with Alibaba, and the first devices to carry Qwen Intelligence will be HONOR's Magic9 Series, due on 28 September, and the HONOR Robot Phone. The work sits on top of HONOR's own MagicOS software. We looked at that unusual handset when HONOR first teased it, in our piece on the Robot Phone and its ARRI cinema camera.
Three agents that do the work
Qwen Intelligence launches with three agents. The Mobile Planner Agent breaks a request into steps: ask it to arrange a Monday trip to Shanghai and it books the flight, reserves a hotel, sets calendar events and plans the itinerary, then adjusts if a flight is cancelled. The Mobile-Use Agent carries out those actions across apps, using each app's built-in connections first and falling back to tapping through the screen when it has to. The Mobile Creative Agent is a lighter model for making and editing images on the phone.
Underneath, Alibaba describes three layers: a Qwen model built for phones, a middle platform that makers can customise and govern, and premium agents aimed at specific tasks.
Why it matters for Malaysia
Agentic features are where every phone brand is now competing, from Google's Gemini to Samsung's Galaxy AI, and most of that intelligence still leans on the cloud. Alibaba's argument is that a model built for the phone can do more on the device, at lower cost, than shrinking a general-purpose model to fit. For a Malaysian buyer, the real question is reliability: an assistant that books the wrong flight is worse than none.
Alibaba says HONOR phones running the platform reach a task accuracy of up to 91.8% and can string together flows of more than 100 steps. Those are the two companies' own figures, measured on their own benchmarks, so they are worth watching rather than banking on. Alibaba has also published an open set of four tests, including one covering more than 1,000 real tasks and 200 mobile tools, which at least lets rivals check the claims.
Availability
Qwen Intelligence is available through its official site and Alibaba Cloud. HONOR sells widely in Malaysia, but neither company has confirmed local pricing or a Malaysian on-sale date for the Magic9 Series or the Robot Phone, so treat the 28 September launch as a global one for now. This is Alibaba's second consumer AI-agent push this year, after QwenWork brought its workplace agents to a Malaysian beta.
If Qwen Intelligence works as described, phones built on it will feel less like tools you operate and more like an assistant that gets things done. HONOR's Magic9 will be the first real test.
