Author | Dai Cong

Editor | Hu Zhanjia

Operations | Chen Jiahui

Produced by | LingTai LT (ID: LingTai_LT)

Header Image | Publicly available online image

In just 10 days, Tencent, Alibaba, and ByteDance have all made significant moves in the AI office sector.

Alibaba launched QianWen Office, integrating three internal Agent products—QoderWork, Wukong, and MuleRun—into a single entry point, quietly placed in the left navigation bar of DingTalk. ByteDance underwent its largest organizational change in five years, splitting off the Feishu product team and merging it with Doubao to form the Doubao product team, with "Doubao Office" on the horizon. Earlier, Tencent incorporated its QClaw business into the organizational structure housing WorkBuddy.

A new trend is emerging: driven by AI Agents, traditional office products are being phased out. AI office solutions require not just product improvements but also the courage to start from scratch. Once-contemporary products like DingTalk and Feishu are gradually being swept away by the tides of the era.

The Future Belongs to AI Office Opportunities

The Decade-Long War Between Feishu and DingTalk

The rivalry between Feishu and DingTalk has a long history.

A decade ago (in 2016), ByteDance initiated the development of Feishu internally, aiming to create an office product tailored to its needs. However, its subsequent development far exceeded ByteDance's initial expectations. In 2019, ByteDance opened Feishu to the public, engaging in direct competition with DingTalk. The two clashed over user numbers, features, clients, revenue, and even office spaces.

Feishu's East China headquarters is located in Hangzhou Future Sci-Tech City, just a stone's throw away from DingTalk's global headquarters. A source close to the matter told LingTai LT (ID: LingTai_LT) that Feishu's choice of location in East China was, to some extent, to facilitate poaching talent from DingTalk.

During those years, Feishu experienced rapid expansion, with its workforce nearing 10,000 at one point, while its monthly active users were in the tens of millions. In contrast, DingTalk, with 200 million monthly active users, had a team of just over 2,000. To some extent, Feishu's approach exemplified ByteDance's strategy of achieving success through massive investment, but it also brought significant cost pressures. A ByteDance employee revealed that Feishu often catered to internal demands, sometimes fulfilling requests from individual colleagues, which may be related to Feishu's original purpose.

Against this backdrop, Feishu had to lay off more than 2,000 employees in March 2024. In comparison, DingTalk's total workforce remained at just over 2,000.

According to comprehensive media information from Tianyancha, DingTalk was launched a year earlier than Feishu but immediately targeted the B2B market. Leveraging "free" services and "attendance tracking," it quickly dominated the enterprise office market. A former ByteDance mid-level manager explained to LingTai LT (ID: LingTai_LT) that while attendance tracking may seem simple, it is far more complex in many manufacturing settings.

For example, a major appliance manufacturer has highly complex attendance settings. Firstly, workers operate on multiple shifts, requiring alignment with schedules. Secondly, workers may work across multiple sites, necessitating accurate geographical tracking. Finally, workers' salary settlements are closely tied to attendance. This is already highly complex, not to mention exceptions like leave and shift changes.

Feishu has long been perceived as an advanced team with cutting-edge products, often overlooking basic functions like attendance tracking. Another example is that some accounting software on DingTalk features dual passwords, a traditional function Feishu would never implement. As a result, DingTalk surged ahead in the early years. After venturing into external commercialization, Feishu focused on key accounts (KAs). Over the past few years, while Feishu's user share in the overall enterprise office market has not grown significantly, its annual revenue growth has reached 30%. Consequently, Feishu and DingTalk, products with vastly different user bases, now have very similar revenues.

According to Caijing, in terms of user numbers, Feishu had 30 million monthly active users in 2025, while DingTalk had 200 million—a significant gap. In terms of revenue, Feishu's ARR (annual revenue) exceeded 3 billion yuan that year, while DingTalk's ARR was just over 4 billion yuan, only 1 billion yuan more than Feishu's. Of course, considering computing power, marketing, and other expenses, Feishu remains unprofitable in the short term.

DingTalk is certainly facing crises.

In March 2025, Alibaba recalled Wu Zhao, the founder of DingTalk, partly to compete for key accounts. After his return, Wu Zhao focused on strict attendance tracking and initiated a price war to win clients, aiming to achieve profitability within 12 months. Meanwhile, at the product level, DingTalk launched an AI spreadsheet in the area where Feishu prides itself the most—multi-dimensional tables. Feishu responded swiftly, releasing an upgraded version of its multi-dimensional tables, which Xie Xin claimed was at least 12 months ahead of DingTalk's.

However, at that time, neither Wu Zhao nor Xie Xin could have anticipated that this debate would soon become irrelevant. A few months later, Wu Zhao was forced to leave DingTalk for a second time due to the "Trapped in DingTalk" incident, replaced by Chen Yusen, a post-90s leader who quickly spearheaded the launch of QianWen Office. Meanwhile, Xie Xin was reassigned to report to Zhao Qi, the head of Doubao, to support Doubao Office.

The rivalry between Feishu and DingTalk seemed to end abruptly within a week, but a new war had just begun.

WorkBuddy Disrupts the AI Office Market

Many media outlets attribute Alibaba and ByteDance's adjustments to the stimulus from Tencent's WorkBuddy, but this is not entirely accurate.

According to Baijing Lab, a source close to Feishu revealed that ByteDance had proposed merging Feishu with Volcano Engine and Doubao internally as early as last year, before WorkBuddy and QClaw were launched. In March of this year, WorkBuddy began public testing. On its second day of launch, request volumes surged, forcing the team to urgently scale up capacity.

On July 22, Analysys released the "China Office Intelligent Agent Platform Market Insights for Q2 2026" report. The data showed that in June 2026, Tencent's WorkBuddy had 20.97 million monthly visits, approaching Feishu's 30 million and far ahead of ByteDance's Trae and QoderWork.

In short, an AI office intelligent agent launched just a few months ago is already nearly on par with Feishu, which has been around for nearly a decade. This is undoubtedly due to strong support from Tencent Group but also reflects WorkBuddy's remarkable word-of-mouth growth.

In the past ten days, Alibaba and ByteDance have announced organizational adjustments to their AI office divisions: Alibaba unveiled "QianWen Office," led by Chen Yusen, the newly appointed CEO of DingTalk. ByteDance integrated the Feishu and Doubao teams to form a new Doubao Office product team, led by Zhao Qi, who is relatively unknown to the public.

Compared to Wu Zhao and Xie Xin, the public knows much less about Chen Yusen and Zhao Qi. According to comprehensive media information from Tianyancha, both share a common background in AI-related work. Chen Yusen is a young, renowned tech geek who, before becoming CEO of DingTalk, was leading a team at Alibaba Cloud to develop the AI Agent product MuleRun. Zhao Qi holds a Ph.D. in computer science from Peking University and previously worked at Douban and Wandoujia. In 2017, he joined ByteDance, serving in growth, commercialization, and HR roles. A year ago, Zhao Qi transitioned from HR to lead the Doubao product team.

Whether it's Tencent's emphasis on WorkBuddy or Alibaba and ByteDance's series of adjustments, the essence is to compete for entry points into office scenarios in the AI era, albeit through different approaches.

Tencent's approach is to fully support WorkBuddy after seeing its success. Alibaba appointed an AI Agent team leader as CEO of DingTalk, integrating his previous MuleRun with Wukong and related QoderWork products within DingTalk to create "QianWen Office," which is then bidirectionally embedded with DingTalk for complementarity and connectivity. ByteDance merged the Feishu and Doubao product teams into the Doubao Office product team, integrating Doubao's capabilities into the Feishu system.

The merger of Doubao and Feishu is not surprising.

Before this merger, Feishu's product team was already deeply involved in developing the enterprise version of Doubao and had begun internal testing with some Feishu clients. A month ago, Doubao and Feishu accounts were integrated, seen as a signal of their deeper merger.

Feishu is gradually giving way to Doubao and is no longer the protagonist of ByteDance's B2B office products. This is not Feishu's fault but a result of the changing times.

Over the past few years, competition between Feishu and DingTalk has centered on traditional office needs: whether it's DingTalk's attendance tracking or Feishu's documents and multi-dimensional tables, their primary goal has been to improve workflow efficiency for enterprises. However, the emergence of AI Agents is disrupting past work models. People now need more than just a smoother collaboration process; they hope Agents can handle a significant amount of repetitive and tedious work.

"The primary user of software is shifting from humans to Agents," an industry insider commented in a media interview.

The Forgotten WeCom

While the rivalry and decline of Feishu and DingTalk are notable, and WorkBuddy's disruption has acted as a catalyst in the AI-era office war, many have overlooked WeCom, which once formed a tripartite balance with DingTalk and Feishu.

WorkBuddy is Tencent's rising star in the AI office era, but WeCom, with hundreds of millions of users, is not a minor player to be ignored. However, unlike Alibaba and ByteDance, Tencent has not deeply integrated WorkBuddy with WeCom, primarily because WeCom belongs to the WeChat Business Group (WXG), while WorkBuddy is part of Tencent Cloud & Smart Industries Group (CSIG).

As is well known, WeChat enjoys significant independence within Tencent, making deep integration between WorkBuddy and WeCom almost an impossible task. Even for foundational models, WeChat independently developed a lightweight large model, WeLM, in addition to Tencent's mainstay Hunyuan model. WeChat's Xiaowei Assistant, currently in beta testing, adopts a hybrid architecture of "WeLM for lightweight tasks + DeepSeek for complex reasoning as a fallback."

Of course, in the overall office market, WeCom has always taken a different path from Feishu and DingTalk. Leveraging WeChat's billion-plus users, WeCom's main advantage has always been its connection to C-end users, acting as a bridge to help enterprises reach clients within the WeChat ecosystem.

As a result, while DingTalk and Feishu were locked in fierce competition, WeCom, with hundreds of millions of monthly active users, remained largely out of the spotlight. However, AI seems to be changing this dynamic.

According to comprehensive media information from Tianyancha, in June of this year, WeCom introduced an AI Agent named "Dayuan" in version 5.0.9 and began internal testing. However, it was not until July 27 that "Dayuan" gained widespread attention when the official WeChat account, WeChat Pie, published an article introducing its capabilities: support for invoking WeCom's intelligent documents, meetings, schedules, etc. Notably, "Dayuan" does not currently integrate WeChat's WeLM model but instead uses DeepSeek, Hunyuan, and MiniMax, with the ability to switch between the three models. The default model is DeepSeek-V4-Flash.

There are also reports of internal testing with WeLM integration. WeCom's decision not to directly integrate WeLM may stem from considerations regarding the model capabilities and parameters required for Agent-based office tasks. In the future, as WeLM iterates, it is possible that WeCom will eventually adopt WeLM, similar to how WeChat's Xiaowei Assistant uses a self-developed model.

In Tencent's B2B business, Tencent Docs and Tencent Meeting, like WorkBuddy, belong to the CSIG group, while WeCom operates independently under WXG. This has been a point of criticism regarding Tencent's B2B SaaS market layout (layout).

Now, in the AI era, this issue persists. On the positive side, WorkBuddy has unexpectedly helped Tencent gain an early lead in the large model era. In the previous era, WeCom carved out a niche by leveraging WeChat's connections, DingTalk led with its ultimate (extreme) attendance tracking, and Feishu, after three years of Build up power (building momentum), captured many head (top-tier) users with its ultimate (extreme) document experience, achieving rapid revenue growth in recent years.

In the rapidly evolving AI agent era, while Feishu and DingTalk are still locked in competition, WorkBuddy has emerged as a leader in AI office products, prompting Alibaba and ByteDance to undertake significant organizational reforms.

In just one week, Alibaba and ByteDance swiftly completed organizational adjustments, with Qianwen Office and Doubao Office on the horizon. Tencent is also vigorously promoting WorkBuddy, with advertisements blanketing subway stations and elevator spaces in residential areas, while WeCom's 'Dayuan' is still in the beta testing phase.

In this new era, who will become the primary gateway for workers' desktop office needs remains undecided, and a true competition has only just begun.