Chinese companies could start making money from AI agents next year, UBS says

As advanced models like DeepSeek’s R2 become more sophisticated, UBS expects ‘to see more monetisation’

“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”.

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