Tencent Cloud and Elastic Strengthen Strategic Collaboration to Build Context Infrastructure for the AI Era

SHENZHEN, China, Aug. 31, 2026 /PRNewswire/ -- Tencent Cloud, the cloud business of global technology company Tencent, and Elastic announced an expanded strategic collaboration in Shenzhen. The companies will deepen their technical and product collaboration across AI search, enterprise data, and agentic applications, helping enterprises establish dedicated context infrastructure for the AI era.

The two companies also jointly launched Tencent Cloud Elasticsearch Service (ES) Enterprise Edition, which introduces Elastic's enterprise-grade search and AI capabilities to the platform.

Elasticsearch is one of the world's most widely used open-source search engines. Elastic's Search AI Platform, the foundation for its search, observability, and security solutions, is used by thousands of companies, including more than 50% of the Fortune 500. It supports tasks such as product search in e-commerce, in-app search, and the troubleshooting and analysis of system logs. Tencent Cloud has been offering cloud services based on Elasticsearch since 2016.

AI is fundamentally changing the role of enterprise search, serving as the essential bridge that retrieves real-time context from internal data to ground large language models (LLMs). These models do not inherently understand an enterprise's internal information. To answer business questions, they need to retrieve relevant content from enterprise data in real time. Agents also need to continuously locate information and tools as they carry out tasks. Search is becoming a way to provide AI systems with grounded enterprise data.

Patrick Dixon, Senior Director of Channels & Alliances for APJ and Vice President for China at Elastic, said that as large language model capabilities advance, context is becoming increasingly important to enterprise AI applications. For agents, the ability to locate accurate and reliable enterprise data when it is needed directly affects the quality of subsequent responses, decisions, and execution.

Tencent Cloud Elasticsearch Service (ES) Enterprise Edition strengthens AI search, model integration, and agent connectivity. Enterprises can combine keyword and semantic search, enable large language models and agents to call search results directly, and keep large volumes of historical data searchable to provide AI with more complete business context.

Alongside Elastic's native capabilities, Tencent Cloud has continued to enhance ES with in-house engineering. In selected AI search scenarios, performance has improved by up to 5x, hybrid search latency has fallen by 60%, and memory consumption has been reduced by more than 50%.

Enterprises can add AI search capabilities without changing their existing data architecture and can use the service together with Tencent Hunyuan large language models and the Tencent Cloud TCRay inference platform. Customers running open-source editions or self-managed clusters can also access technical migration and upgrade services.

Enterprises are already leveraging these advanced search capabilities to optimize their AI and security workflows. Tencent ima uses ES as the underlying retrieval layer for its knowledge base, supporting both keyword and semantic search. After Tencent Cloud optimized the system for many users searching the knowledge base concurrently, memory consumption fell by 71% and retrieval performance improved by 58%.

At NIO, Tencent Cloud Elasticsearch Service (ES) serves as part of a security data intelligence foundation. It identifies the information most relevant to a current event from large volumes of security data, which AI then analyzes further. The system processes hundreds of billions of records in a single quarter. In one real-world attack, an attack chain that previously took analysts most of a day to investigate manually can now be retrieved and reconstructed in just two minutes.

Cheng Bin, General Manager of Data Platform Products at Tencent Cloud Data Analytics, said, "AI search is evolving from a standalone retrieval capability into infrastructure that connects enterprise data, models, and agentic applications. Tencent Cloud will combine Elastic's enterprise-grade capabilities with its own experience in operating large-scale systems and its AI ecosystem, helping more enterprises establish context infrastructure for the AI era."

Han Xiao, Vice President of AI at Elastic, said that as large language models turn toward longer-horizon tasks in 2026, search has more room to contribute. "Search in 2026 is, in essence, about test-time compute." He added, "When search quality falls short, teams should first consider whether additional inference compute can address the problem before adding data or switching to a larger model."

Tencent Cloud was among the early cloud providers in China to form a Platinum-level partnership with Elastic. Over the past seven years, Tencent Cloud has consistently ranked among the leading contributors to the Elastic open-source community. Tencent Cloud Elasticsearch Service (ES) now runs 20,000 clusters and 100,000 nodes, reliably supporting search traffic peaks for large-scale live events, including the China Media Group (CMG) Spring Festival Gala and the Paris Olympic Games.

About Tencent Cloud

Tencent Cloud is one of the world's fastest-growing cloud service providers, committed to delivering innovative solutions that address everyday life and business challenges, and empowering the digital transformation of smart industries. Tencent Cloud has always upheld its mission to meet the needs of diverse industries, leveraging cloud computing, big data analytics, AI, IoT and cybersecurity, together with its extensive global infrastructure, to provide businesses with stable, secure, and industry-leading cloud products and services across a wide range of sectors, including education, finance, healthcare, gaming, media and entertainment, property, retail, travel, and transportation.

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Tencent Cloud and Elastic Strengthen Strategic Collaboration to Build Context Infrastructure for the AI Era

A Gold Stevie and three SaaS Awards highlight Payapps' role in helping contractors simplify progress claim submission, assessment and approval.

MELBOURNE, Australia, Aug. 31, 2026 /PRNewswire/ -- Australian-founded Payapps – An Autodesk Company has received four major international award wins across the 2026 Stevie Awards for Technology Excellence and 2026 SaaS Awards, recognising its construction software, market adoption and measurable customer impact across Australia, New Zealand, the United Kingdom and Ireland.

Payapps won a Gold Stevie® Award for Company of the Year – Construction & Civil Engineering Technology, alongside three SaaS Awards:

• Best SaaS Product for Construction or Property Management
• Best SaaS Solution for Finance & FinTech
• Best SaaS Product for Workflow Automation

Payapps provides purpose-built progress claim software that helps main contractors and subcontractors standardise the submission, assessment and approval of progress claims, together with associated compliance and commercial workflows. The platform replaces fragmented spreadsheet and email-based processes with shared digital workflows and integrates with construction ERP and financial systems.

Recognition backed by adoption and customer impact

The award submissions represented Payapps' two operating markets — Australia and New Zealand, and the United Kingdom and Ireland — and drew on customer evidence from across both regions.

Payapps now supports more than 57,000 users, with more than AUD $35 billion in progress claims managed through the platform annually. In Australia, Payapps is used by 34 of the country's Top 50 builders.

"Over the last 10+ years, we've worked closely with the construction industry, keeping a clear focus on progress claims and listening closely to our customers. We've seen how managing progress claims through disjointed spreadsheets and emails adds avoidable risk to what is already a time-bound commercial process. When that process breaks down, the effects can flow through to cash flow and project delivery," said Misty Cronin, Head of Sales, Australia & New Zealand at Payapps.

"That's why this recognition matters. It validates the importance of making progress claim workflows more consistent and easier to manage, while also reflecting years of work from a team committed to standardising and simplifying this critical construction process."

Payapps customer success stories demonstrate how those improvements can translate into day-to-day construction operations. Buildcorp has used Payapps to standardise payment claim submission and improve visibility across its projects, while Sarah Constructions replaced fragmented spreadsheets with a single workflow spanning progress claims, compliance and Early Payment requests.

Early Payment enables eligible subcontractors to request earlier payment on approved claims within the existing Payapps workflow, while main contractors retain governance, visibility and commercial control.

Progress claim workflows at the centre of the recognition

The three SaaS Awards recognise Payapps across construction and property management, finance and FinTech, and workflow automation — different dimensions of the commercial processes surrounding construction progress claims.

Annabelle Whittall, COO of The Cloud Awards, said: "The SaaS Awards recognize products that solve genuine industry challenges while delivering measurable value for their users, and Payapps stands out as an exceptional example."

The Gold Stevie broadens that recognition to the company level, with Payapps named Company of the Year in the Construction & Civil Engineering Technology category.

Together, the awards provide independent recognition of an Australian-founded construction technology business that has grown across two international markets and is now part of Autodesk, while remaining focused on a specific industry challenge: making progress claim submission, assessment, approval and compliance simpler and more consistent.

About Payapps

Payapps, an Autodesk Company, is an award-winning cloud-based collaboration platform for the construction industry. It helps main contractors and subcontractors simplify and standardise progress claim submission, assessment and approval, including variations, retentions and compliance documentation.

By digitising these workflows, Payapps improves transparency, accuracy and collaboration while reducing administrative burden and financial risk. Payapps integrates with a wide range of construction ERP, project and financial management systems to provide greater visibility across project progress claim processes.

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Payapps wins global recognition for construction software and customer impact