Ant Group’s AQ health app has reached 150 million users and handles nearly 20 million health inquiries a day, the company said on September 10 at the 2026 Inclusion Conference on the Bund.
Ant said it would continue investing in health services, expanding beyond weight management into exercise, diet, sleep, and mental well-being. It also added a “Health” section to the app’s homepage.
At the conference, visitors crowded around AQ’s partner displays, where Huawei, Apple, Xiaomi, and Yuwell were among the brands represented. Lines formed at demonstration areas, while a packed health forum brought together partners to discuss opportunities for artificial intelligence. Exhibits depicting a future hospital, home, and rural clinic showed how the technology could fit into daily health management.
AQ broadens its user base
A dining table covered with model dishes anchored AQ’s “future home” exhibit. The demonstration showed how its multimodal image recognition lets users point a phone at a meal to identify dishes, estimate calories, carbohydrates, protein, and other nutritional information, and log what they eat.
Such features illustrate the everyday use cases behind AQ’s growth. Its reported reach and inquiry volume point to broad demand for AI-assisted health information, although whether that engagement translates into sustained commercial demand remains less clear.
According to Ant, 55% of AQ users live in third-tier cities or smaller communities, while about 25% are older adults. Those figures suggest its audience extends beyond early adopters to people seeking basic health support.
At the “future rural clinic” exhibit, objects and photographs documented a village clinic in Pu’an, Guizhou. They showed how AI can help village doctors generate recommendations on diagnosis, treatment, and medication, illustrating how Ant envisions AQ being used in rural care.
The updated app has three main entry points: the AQ chat interface, medical services, and the new “Health” section. Users can ask the AI to bring up a service or select the relevant section directly.
In the Health section, users can view data from connected devices alongside information generated from food logs. These feed into more than ten health indicators, including weight and sleep. Features such as food scanning and nutrition advice use AI to provide assessments and suggestions.
What a smart scale adds to AI health services
In late June, AQ launched a campaign encouraging users to collectively lose 50 million kilograms while promoting what Ant described as science-based weight management. Participants could obtain a smart body composition scale at a subsidized price, connect it to the app, receive personalized diet and exercise plans generated with AI, and log changes through online check-ins.
More than two months after launch, the campaign had attracted over 2.75 million participants, with a reported combined weight loss of about 2.5 million kilograms. Tmall data cited by 36Kr showed that searches for body composition scales linked to the campaign exceeded those during the 618 shopping festival. Transactions involving domestic scale brands rose 60% year-on-year in June and 100% in July.
The campaign gives AQ a test of whether combining smart hardware with ongoing AI guidance can sustain user engagement.
Weight management requires continued attention to diet, exercise, and sleep. AQ’s participation figures suggest users are willing to try a technology-based form of personalized guidance. One potential advantage is cost: one-on-one nutritional guidance can be expensive, while software can distribute personalized recommendations to large numbers of users.
Product design also matters. AQ made the scale an entry point to an ongoing service: users weigh themselves, view their measurements, receive an AI interpretation and a plan, act on it, and weigh themselves again.
That sequence breaks weight management into actions users can follow and track. Each weigh-in supplies feedback, while check-ins and recorded changes add a measure of accountability.
The relationship with the hardware changes as well. A conventional scale provides a measurement. When connected to AQ, that reading becomes an input for subsequent guidance, which could in turn encourage continued use of the device.
Yu Caihao, deputy general manager of Yuwell Medical, described how this could work with continuous glucose monitoring, or CGM. Once glucose readings enter AQ’s health records, he said, advice can move beyond general education to feedback intended to influence behavior. For example, being told that a milk tea can keep blood sugar levels elevated for four hours might prompt a user to reconsider the choice.
The partnerships extend beyond devices. Restaurant chain Laoxiangji introduced AQ’s food scan experience at 73 stores in Hangzhou, using multimodal recognition to identify the nutritional content of meals.
Fitness chains including Lefit and Zhongtian Fitness also joined. Lefit founder and CEO Han Wei said AI could become a significant factor in health management and that AQ’s campaign would directly or indirectly stimulate spending on health. “Users become healthier, and the industry grows too,” he said.
AQ’s strategy is to use a common need such as weight management as an entry point, then connect device makers, restaurants, and fitness providers around it. If user engagement persists, that ecosystem could expand demand for proactive health services.
Weight management is a starting point
If AI can give a body composition scale a broader role, could it do the same for sleep trackers, sports watches, and continuous glucose monitors?
The weight management campaign shows how an AI platform can coordinate multiple providers around an everyday need. If AQ can apply that model to chronic disease management, diet, and maternity care, it could broaden the platform’s use across a wider range of health services.
Sleep is one of the areas it plans to address next. A study by researchers from the Chinese Center for Disease Control and Prevention, Fudan University, and other institutions, published in The Lancet Regional Health, found that more than 23% of people in China age 15 and older had poor sleep quality, defined as a Pittsburgh Sleep Quality Index score above five.
Sleep tracking can involve a combination of devices, content, and health guidance, but users may lack a convenient way to interpret the data their devices collect.
AQ has integrated with Xiaomi’s Mi Fitness app. Users viewing sleep and heart rate data can call on AQ to interpret the readings and provide preliminary health guidance.
For partners, linking specialist products and services to AQ provides access to a user base of more than 100 million. According to Ant, its expanding hardware network now supports devices from 18 brands, including Huawei, Apple, Xiaomi, and Yuwell.
Government policy also supports a more active approach to health. The State Council’s national health strategy for the 15th five-year plan period calls for greater emphasis on proactive health management. The Healthy China 2030 outline sets a target for the health services industry to reach RMB 16 trillion (USD 2.4 trillion) by 2030.
KrASIA features translated and adapted content that was originally published by 36Kr. This article was written by Xiao Xi for 36Kr.
Note: RMB figures are converted to USD at rates of RMB 6.73 = USD 1 based on estimates as of September 16, 2026, unless otherwise stated. USD conversions are approximate and, where appropriate, rounded for ease of reference. They may not fully match prevailing exchange rates.