The underlying logic behind this organizational adjustment is ByteDance's strategic upgrade of its AI To B business.

Rumors about layoffs at the Doubao team, including claims that the team was halved and that the company "first cut the people who taught it to talk," have recently sparked widespread discussion.

Doubao PR Head: Information Is Inaccurate

On September 24, Liu Xing, the public relations head of Doubao, posted a statement saying that some media outlets reported an organizational adjustment of the Doubao Session team, and some self-media accounts interpreted it as Doubao layoffs or the Doubao conversation team being cut in half. This information is inaccurate. In reality, it was merely an organizational adjustment of division of labor.

Part of the functions of the Doubao general Session team were split off to the Doubao transaction and Doubao work teams, so personnel moved along with them. Many are still doing their previous work, such as transactions, which also involves optimizing the transaction conversation experience. This team has fewer than 50 people, and the division adjustment involved 11 people, of whom 3 resigned. Claims in some self-media reports such as "Doubao, used by 200 million people, is laying off staff" and "the conversation team cut in half" are inaccurate.

The incident began with a report stating that Doubao, an AI product under ByteDance, was undergoing internal team adjustments, with the general Session team responsible for conversation product capabilities planning to reduce its workforce by about half. The report also noted that after the adjustment, some personnel would be transferred to Doubao commercialization, Feishu, and other teams, while the rest would be laid off. One Doubao employee remarked that Doubao has now become a "marginal product" with over 200 million daily active users.

ByteDance's Strategic Upgrade of AI To B Business

To understand the essence of this adjustment, it must be placed in the broader context of a series of organizational restructurings at ByteDance over the past six months. On July 30, ByteDance launched an organizational structure adjustment for its AI business, restructuring the product development and commercialization systems of its three major businesses: Doubao, Feishu, and Volcano Engine.

According to the adjustment plan, on the product side, the Feishu product team and the Doubao product team will be integrated to form a new Doubao product team, led by Doubao head Zhao Qi, with Feishu head Xie Xin reporting to Zhao Qi. ByteDance stated that after the integration, Feishu's existing products and services will remain unchanged, and both parties will focus on deepening product integration in office productivity scenarios. It is reported that the Doubao Enterprise Edition, deeply developed with the participation of the Feishu product team, has already begun internal testing among some Feishu clients. Currently, the Doubao Enterprise Edition natively integrates Feishu documents, spreadsheets, meetings, group chats, and other office scenarios, supports Q&A and creation functions based on enterprise-owned knowledge bases, and is equipped with enterprise-level security capabilities such as data isolation, permission control, and security auditing.

On the commercialization side, the original Feishu GTM (marketing, sales, customer service) team was integrated with the corresponding Volcano Engine team to form a To B GTM organization called the "Creativity Service Platform," which is responsible for the marketing, sales, and customer service of ByteDance's MaaS and SaaS cloud services. It is led by Volcano Engine head Tan Dai, with Feishu sales head Lin Chan and Feishu strategy and marketing head Shi Zhijun reporting to Tan Dai.

The underlying logic of this organizational adjustment is ByteDance's strategic upgrade of its AI To B business. Under this framework, the dispersal of Doubao general Session team personnel into the transaction team and the work team carries implications far more complex than "layoffs" or "marginalization." Injecting conversation capabilities into transaction scenarios means Doubao is attempting to transform chat into an optimized transaction conversation experience, enabling AI not only to chat with users but also to help them complete practical tasks such as hotel bookings and product purchases. Similarly, channeling conversation capabilities into the Doubao work team is aimed at implementing AI capabilities in enterprise office scenarios.

Commercialization Exploration Is an Inevitable Choice

This is not the first time Doubao has leaned toward the "work" direction. In May 2026, the Doubao App quietly launched a paid service statement, introducing three subscription tiers: Standard at 68 yuan per month, Enhanced at 200 yuan per month, and Professional at 500 yuan per month, mainly targeting complex productivity scenarios such as data analysis and film and television production.

The reason Doubao chose to charge users at this time is not simply a product strategy adjustment, but an inevitable result forced by the underlying cost structure of the large model industry. Large models are truly "money-devouring beasts." Every user conversation and image generation is backed by a frenzy of computing power consumption. High user growth and the explosion of AI video and intelligent agents have caused token consumption to rise exponentially, with computing power, electricity, and bandwidth costs continuing to climb.

Data shows that in 2025, the domestic large model industry as a whole lost over 18 billion yuan, and CICC predicts that industry losses will exceed 20 billion yuan in 2026. Taking Doubao as an example, its parent company ByteDance's capital expenditure in 2025 was 150 billion yuan, of which 90 billion yuan was specifically for AI computing power procurement; the AI segment's average daily fixed investment was 438 million yuan, causing net profit to decline by 70% year-on-year. Doubao consumes approximately 120 trillion tokens per day, a more than 1,000-fold increase over two years. According to third-party estimates, Doubao's monthly net loss is approximately 210 million to 270 million yuan. Other leading large model companies also generally posted losses of over 2 billion yuan in 2025.

Therefore, for Doubao, which has 345 million monthly active users, exploring commercialization is an inevitable choice.

Doubao Offers Another 30 Days of Subscription Benefits, Free for All Users

On August 25, Doubao Work was officially unveiled, entering direct competition with Tencent WorkBuddy and Alibaba Qwen Office. Public information shows that as a new Agent product and brand launched by Doubao, "Doubao Work" has iterated rapidly since its release, successively updating features such as multi-agent parallelism, GUI computer operation, local Office file editing, and free switching of task execution environments. Recently, the Doubao 2.1 Pro model also completed a version upgrade, performing outstandingly in multimodal programming.

Notably, one month after the official release of Doubao Work, Doubao once again launched a free benefit campaign: users who download or upgrade the Doubao Work PC version or the Doubao PC version can receive 30 days of subscription benefits for free. Users who have already claimed the previous round of 30-day benefits will receive the next round of 30 days of free subscription when their benefits are about to expire. Users who had already paid for a subscription before claiming will have their paid benefits automatically extended and can also enjoy priority during peak periods throughout.

This is the second time in a month that Doubao has distributed subscription benefits to all users for free. During the official release of "Doubao Work" on August 25, users could receive 30 days of free subscription by downloading, logging in, or upgrading. At the Volcano Engine FORCE Original Power Conference in June this year, ByteDance CEO Liang Rubo mentioned in his opening speech that "climbing the AI peak is the most important thing for ByteDance right now," and that ByteDance is "focusing its energy on AI, and within AI, focusing on improving model capabilities."

In 2026, AI competition has shifted from "being able to chat" to "being able to get things done." The shrinking of the Doubao conversation team is not the end of this war, but a key move by ByteDance to reallocate resources from chatting to doing work.