“2026 is the year of agent monetisation in China,” said Sundeep Gantori, an equity strategist at UBS Global Wealth Management CIO, on Thursday. As advanced models like DeepSeek’s R2 become more sophisticated, “we expect to see more monetisation”, he added.
AI agents are widely considered to be the next evolutionary stage of generative AI and some of the largest tech companies in the world, like Google and OpenAI, have been hotly competing in the space. On Wednesday, German translation start-up DeepL said it launched an AI agent that can complete “repetitive, time-intensive tasks across a wide variety of functions”.
The US market for AI agents – with many applications in coding, wealth management and other kinds of automation – currently generates about US$15 billion to US$20 billion in annual revenue, according to Gantori. This is mainly because in the US, businesses are used to buying and using advanced software and the AI models being used are very sophisticated, he added.
In China, businesses are not used to paying monthly subscriptions for enterprise software and AI agents have been more focused on the consumer side, from shopping to entertainment.
“We are not seeing … enough monetisation today in China because the models are not there,” he said, adding that things could change next year as the country’s large language models became more sophisticated.
