Tencent is making a significant bet on artificial intelligence in its financial advisory services.

In May, the giant Chinese digital company confirmed the establishment of the second of two laboratories devoted to AI research. The newer lab is located in Seattle, and the other is in Shenzhen, China.

Following that May news, in an announcement last week, President Martin Lau elaborated on the strategy, indicating that Tencent’s interest in AI is part of its long-term business plan:

We will make sustained, long-term and patient investments, as we believe this is an exciting long-term investment, not short-term bets that will yield direct profits.

The company appears to intend to use its AI learnings to predict market trends and improve its personalized financial services, sources said. WeChat, Tencent’s flagship product, is expected to play a large role in this endeavor, mainly because it generates huge amounts of data to study. WeChat Pay, WeChat’s payment service, generated 40% of China’s mobile payment volume as of the first quarter of 2017.

The mobile app boasted 889 million users at the end of last year. This figure is expected to reach 1 billion before 2017 ends.

WeChat helps facilitate a wide array of web-based services, including online banking, through its chat function.

AI specialist Tak Lo of the Hong-Kong-based artificial intelligence startup accelerator, Zeroth.ai, anticipates that WeChat will serve as a conduit for AI-related research due to its function as a chat app.

In an interview with Quartz, Lo explained why WeChat is particularly useful for AI analytics:

Conversational data is richer [than search or shopping data], because you have that many people on the platform performing that many interactions.

Half of WeChat’s users spend more than 90 minutes a day on the app. It is expected that the data these users input into the WeChat system will provide the information needed to improve the functionality of Tencent’s AI technology.

Read more on: China Money Network, E27 and Quartz