At the 2025 INCLUSION · Conference on the Bund in Shanghai, Ant Group introduced new service updates to AQ, its AI-powered healthcare application, with the aim of improving access to medical services.

“We hope AI can empower doctors by extending their reach to more patients, freeing up time for medical research and the fight against complex diseases, while equipping community doctors with powerful AI assistants,”

said Cyril Han, Chief Executive Officer of Ant Group.

Since its official launch in China in June 2025, following public testing in September 2024, AQ has been used by 140 million people, 60% of whom are based in third-tier cities or below.

The app provides over 100 AI-supported services, including doctor recommendations, medical report analysis, and personalised health guidance.

Through the platform, users can access digital services from more than 5,000 hospitals, consult with 200,000 doctors online, and use over 300 AI Doctor Agents developed with specialists and major hospitals across China.

Among them are AI agents created by Jian’an Wang, Director of the Heart Centre at the Second Affiliated Hospital of Zhejiang University School of Medicine, and Jun Wang, President of Peking University People’s Hospital and a specialist in thoracic surgery.

To further support healthcare professionals, AQ has launched an AI Agent Development Platform, allowing doctors and institutions to design their own agents.

These tools aim to strengthen patient services and assist community-level practitioners.

A study involving 150 doctors and 1,000 patients found that diagnostic accuracy among community doctors improved by 4 to 8% when using a Urology AI Agent developed with Shanghai’s Renji Hospital.

AQ has also partnered with China Mobile to introduce a dedicated hotline for elderly users, enabling them to access services via voice commands on mobile devices.

The app’s personal health archive has been updated to consolidate more medical data into a single record and integrate with a wider range of wearables and chronic disease management tools.

A new AI-powered feature for skin disease recognition has been added, able to identify more than 50 conditions through a simple photograph, offering users timely guidance.

Separately, at the same conference, Ant Group’s investment management platform Ant Fortune announced that its AI tools would be made available to financial institutions to support investment research, operations, and content creation.

Featured image credit: Ant Group