- The QwenWork AI Lighthouse program will provide AI agents for teaching, research and school administration
- Peking University, Zhejiang University and Fudan University are among the first participants
Alibaba’s AI productivity platform QwenWork has launched an AI education program with more than 100 schools and education organizations onboard, seeking to move AI agents from individual use by teachers and students into broader school and regional education systems.
The QwenWork AI Lighthouse program was announced September 23 at the 2026 Apsara Conference in Hangzhou.
More than 100 join the first batch
The initiative covers primary, secondary and higher education, providing AI-agent products and applications for teaching, research and campus administration.
More than 100 institutions have joined the first group, including Peking University, Zhejiang University, Fudan University, Southeast University, Tongji University and Nankai University.
Other participants include education authorities and schools in Beijing, Shanghai, Shenzhen, Hangzhou, Chongqing, Xi’an and Wuhan.
Many teachers and students are already using AI agents for lesson preparation, research and learning, but mostly on an individual basis.
Scaling AI across schools
QwenWork said the new program aims to turn these experiments into reusable tools that can be deployed across schools and education systems.
Universities can centrally configure accounts and permissions for departments, research groups, teachers and students, while local education authorities can extend access to teachers across their school districts.
At Chunhui Primary School Group in Hangzhou, which has focused on AI education, teachers have used QwenWork to build an AI-powered school management platform called “Xiaohui Gao Guan” (小晖高管).
The system integrates 22 AI applications and administrative systems across its three campuses, according to local media reports.
In university classrooms, teachers can create workspaces around individual courses, guide students in working with AI agents and monitor their progress and results.
As a precursor to the AI Lighthouse program, Alibaba on September 19 donated computing services powered by QwenWork and Qoder to the University of Science and Technology of China, allowing eligible students and faculty to use them free of charge.
Agents for education
For research, advisers can upload papers in batches and have AI compare their research methods and conclusions.
Students can then generate reading reports, check them against the original papers and share materials and notes with their advisers in the same workspace.
QwenWork, an enterprise-grade agent platform designed for organizational use, also unveiled Enterprise Context and agent-hosting capabilities at the Apsara Conference.
The tools are designed to help organizations integrate information, manage permissions and deploy AI agents at scale.
Header image credit: Alibaba Group official WeChat
