- Qwen Creative now lets users assemble AI agents for writing, directing, cinematography and editing
- The launch comes as China’s AI short-drama market surges but struggles with low hit rates and content oversupply
Alibaba on August 31 launched Agent Teams, a new feature on Qwen Creative, its AI platform for professional content production.
Powered by its Wan3.0 video model, the feature is now open to all users.
Instead of writing detailed prompts, users can simply describe an idea and assign different AI agents to handle the creative workflow — including scriptwriting, storyboarding, character design, video generation and editing.
For an AI short drama, for example, users provide the story concept while the agents collaborate sequentially to turn it into a finished video.
Users can intervene at any stage with new ideas or revisions, with the agents adapting the production accordingly.
The feature is available on Qwen Creative’s PC platform and the Qwen app, covering AI short dramas, animated dramas, marketing videos and music videos.
Scale? Yes. Success? Not yet
The launch comes as China’s AI-generated drama market expands rapidly. According to DataEye, a market intelligence provider, the domestic AI drama and animation market exceeded 22 billion yuan ($3.27 billion) in the first five months of 2026 and could reach 40 billion yuan for the full year, up 138% from 2025.
AI short-drama users surpassed 600 million in the first half, while Douyin alone added 221,900 AI short dramas.
Yet scale has not translated into success. The industry’s hit rate stood at just 0.47%, with more than 90% of content generating limited traffic.
The challenge is increasingly shifting from how to produce more to how to produce something people will watch.
Qwen’s Agent Teams is designed to address that gap by bringing multiple creative roles into a single AI workflow, allowing users without professional production skills to make more sophisticated content.
Why it matters globally
For global content creators, the significance extends beyond China’s short-drama boom.
As AI video tools move from prompt-based generation toward autonomous creative workflows, the cost and expertise required to produce professional video could fall sharply.
The next competitive frontier may therefore be less about who can generate a video fastest, and more about which AI can assemble the best creative team.
Header image credit: Qwen Creative
