After a four-month return and four months of preparation, DingTalk founder and CEO Chen Hang (code name Wuzhao) made his first public appearance since returning. On August 25, Chen Hang officially launched DingTalk 8.0, introducing DingTalk One, enterprise AI search engine "AI搜问", and smart hardware features all at once.

Looking back to 2015, DingTalk was born from a "spectacular failure" - a group of young people in a residential space of less than 200 square meters created a disruptive enterprise communication tool that gave Alibaba a foothold in the fierce social competition. Today, DingTalk hosts over 26 million enterprise organizations with more than 190,000 paying organizations.

With the release of version 8.0, DingTalk, enterprise WeChat, and Feishu show remarkable alignment in features like spreadsheets and search functions. As a veteran collaborative office platform with internet background, can Chen Hang achieve DingTalk's second transformation in just four months? Regardless of whether the new version can answer this question, both DingTalk and Chen Hang need to ignite some fires.

**Version 8.0 is Also Version 1.0**

"Brand New DingTalk, AI Era Work Methods" - in mobile app stores, DingTalk 8.0 emphasizes two keywords: new and AI.

Four months ago, Chen Hang returned to DingTalk and received substantial feedback during customer visits, including comments like "outdated design" and "bloated feature layout." "The first thing we did was a comprehensive upgrade, focusing on three main points: simplicity, efficiency, and people-centeredness."

According to him, DingTalk deconstructed all designs from titles to buttons to dividing lines, recombined color schemes, and simplified all functions. "This is absolutely a brand new DingTalk, bringing work back to focus. DingTalk 8.0 is also AI DingTalk's 1.0 - we're determined to clear the past," Chen Hang emphasized repeatedly.

Taking DingTalk One as an example, in traditional work methods, users' daily work information is scattered across multiple scenarios like group chats, to-dos, meetings, documents, and spreadsheets, requiring people to actively seek information, which is inefficient and hard to focus on. DingTalk One organizes all work-related information and tasks by AI priority and presents them to users as information stream cards, changing from "people finding tasks" to "tasks finding people."

DingTalk One is also designed as a unified entry point for natural language conversations between people and AI. Users can long-press the One button for voice conversations, directing various Agents in DingTalk to handle work, such as initiating meetings, creating to-dos, searching information, organizing project progress, conducting knowledge Q&A, or summarizing data from AI spreadsheets, significantly improving information processing efficiency.

Simply put, DingTalk One is an employee's personal secretary. In the collaborative office space, this concept of AI assistants and AI secretaries isn't new. Compared to similar products, none completely overlap with DingTalk One's functionality, but partial feature overlap is common.

**"Just Compare with Yourself"**

"The new DingTalk has many new features compared to the old version," said Zhang Zheng (pseudonym), an executive at an office software company who experienced the new DingTalk. "Just compare with yourself - all the feature points are new."

As a technology solution provider, Zhang Zheng's company collaborates with DingTalk, enterprise WeChat, and Feishu. In his view, "Current enterprise office business mainly involves chatting, creating groups, holding meetings, and writing documents. DingTalk, enterprise WeChat, and Feishu develop AI features around these four activities."

AI search, heavily featured in both DingTalk and enterprise WeChat upgrades, revolves around these four aspects.

Currently, AI search based on large models has gradually become mainstream for information access, but general large models often struggle in enterprise scenarios. Work chat records, long-accumulated enterprise documents, project meeting minutes, collaborative emails, and approval workflows are scattered everywhere, making them hard to find when needed.

DingTalk's newly released enterprise AI search engine "AI搜问" can search people, events, knowledge, and progress, providing precise answers based on user permissions.

According to enterprise WeChat, its latest intelligent search function allows conversational queries, with AI automatically associating chats, documents, meetings, emails, and other scenarios to precisely locate final document versions and automatically aggregate data.

Spreadsheets represent another area of consensus among multiple companies. With AI spreadsheet assistants, DingTalk users can describe ideas through conversation to automatically generate AI spreadsheets, automated workflows, dashboards, or directly perform data queries, formula calculations, or basic operations like sorting, coloring, and widening, further lowering AI spreadsheet usage barriers.

During Feishu's Future Unlimited conference in early July, multidimensional spreadsheets were introduced as follows: "Build sales, HR, e-commerce systems with multidimensional spreadsheets without procurement or development involvement - frontline employees can create business systems for their professions in a short time."

**Igniting Some Fires**

Beyond consensus, DingTalk, industry insiders, and external observers have differing views.

"Haven't noticed DingTalk being bloated," an industry insider familiar with office software reported. "Too bloated, constantly adding features, making it difficult to win through software aesthetics, elegant design, and simple functionality," said Wang Chao, founder of Wenyuan Think Tank, expressing feelings Chen Hang also mentioned that day. This reflects contradictions between developers and users.

As both competitor and partner in the same space, Zhang Zheng's attention to the new DingTalk extends beyond software: "DingTalk's recording hardware and other Agents are developed by external independent vendors, which DingTalk adapts and promotes at larger scale through its platform channels."

For him, such upgrades were expected.

DingTalk AI Listen is a voice recording tool that leverages large models for real-time voice transcription, semantic analysis, and intelligent summarization. DingTalk A1 is DingTalk's first AI hardware product, working in software-hardware coordination with AI Listen.

Beyond business-level changes, external factors also drive DingTalk's transformation. "DingTalk is anxious" and "needs to ignite some fires," industry insiders reported.

According to iResearch consulting reports, China's collaborative office platform market reached 11.7 billion yuan in 2024 and will reach 13.9 billion yuan in 2025. In this space, enterprise WeChat, DingTalk, and Feishu represent internet companies, alongside traditional OA vendors and other professional software providers. Since third-party authoritative institutions only disclose data through 2023, the earliest collaborative office market entrants - Lanling, Panwei, and Zhiyuan - achieved a combined 45.5% market share annually, while DingTalk and enterprise WeChat each held 7.1%.

In Wang Chao's view, "Over these ten years, DingTalk first started as internal employee entrepreneurship, then was taken over by the group for cloud business, experiencing Wuzhao's departure, Yun-Ding integration, and now coming full circle back to Wuzhao. This actually reflects Alibaba's multiple business architecture adjustments over the past decade, with DingTalk as an attachment following the ups and downs."