ByteDance has completed a systematic restructuring of its AI-powered office business, merging Doubao, Feishu, and Volcano Engine into an integrated enterprise intelligence platform while pledging increased investment in the corporate market. This consolidation signals the tech giant's formal entry into the AI office arena with full organizational strength, positioning it for direct competition with Tencent and Alibaba.
On September 15, ByteDance CEO Liang Rubo made a rare public appearance at the "2026 Feishu Future Unlimited Conference and Doubao Work Kickoff Meeting," marking the culmination of two months of integration efforts. During the event, Liang emphasized that agents, models, and collaborative environments must be tightly integrated to unlock their full value — a philosophy that underpins ByteDance's decision to consolidate Doubao, Feishu, and Volcano Engine. Doubao contributes intelligence and agent capabilities, Volcano Engine provides models, computing power, and enterprise services, while Feishu serves as the collaborative environment and workplace hub. He explicitly stated that ByteDance will dedicate greater resources and strength to the enterprise market.
Feishu also disclosed that its annual recurring revenue (ARR) growth rate for the first half of 2026 reached 2.5 times that of the same period last year, setting a new record since its inception. Over 90% of new customers simultaneously purchased Feishu AI products, and the total number of small and medium-sized enterprise customers grew by 70% over the past year. Concurrently, Feishu officially launched version 8.0, featuring a systematic overhaul centered on agents, with the number of externally accessible function interfaces expanding from 247 in March to 767.
The Integration Logic: Three Forces Aligned on a Single Battle Map
Over the past two months, ByteDance has executed a series of rapid organizational adjustments. On July 30, the Feishu product team merged with the Doubao product team, with Feishu head Xie Xin now reporting to Doubao leader Zhao Qi. Meanwhile, Feishu's marketing, sales, and customer service teams merged with Volcano Engine to form a new B2B go-to-market organization. On August 24, the TRAE and Kouzi teams were further consolidated into the Doubao system, and on August 25, "Doubao Work" was officially launched to the public.
Liang Rubo provided a comprehensive strategic rationale for these changes during the conference. He noted that large-model agent capabilities entered a usable stage at the end of last year, accelerating the deployment of AI in productivity scenarios. He argued that agents do not exist in isolation — they require collaboration with people, work environments, and other agents, while remaining highly dependent on model capabilities. Based on this assessment, the three forces were consolidated within two months.
From a product usage perspective, Doubao Work delivers intelligence to employees, while Feishu serves as the collaborative platform carrying enterprise context and tools. Their combination enables employees to naturally leverage AI within their work environments. When enterprises need to build dedicated agents, Volcano Engine provides models, computing power, and development tools, and these agents can also be integrated into Feishu for collaboration with humans and other agents.
Liang Rubo also directly addressed external concerns about Feishu being marginalized. He reviewed Feishu's journey from its full-scale internal migration at ByteDance in 2017 to the launch of its global version in 2019, describing it as the product he had been "most patient with" at ByteDance, taking over two years of refinement before its official release. The conference's naming convention — with Feishu leading and Doubao Work following — combined with Liang's first-ever attendance at Feishu's annual conference, was widely interpreted as an endorsement of Feishu's strategic importance.
Product Upgrades: Agents Transform from Tools to Team Members
Feishu 8.0 centers on the deep integration of agent capabilities as its core feature. In the new version, agents can be added to Feishu groups like employees, capable of writing documents, operating multi-dimensional spreadsheets, scheduling meetings, attending conferences, accessing cloud storage, and initiating approvals. The number of function points exposed to agents through Feishu's command-line interface (CLI) has grown from 247 in March to 767.
ByteDance also launched "Doubao Work Partners," elevating agents from personal assistants to "team members" with independent identities, permissions, and memory, aiming to establish a persistent agent presence in enterprise collaboration scenarios.
Liang Rubo drew on technology industry history to provide a broader context for these initiatives. He noted that over the past 50 years, the IT industry has experienced four technological peaks — PC, Web, mobile internet, and artificial intelligence — and that the AI peak would be "significantly taller" than the previous three. Such industry-level opportunities emerge only once every 15 to 20 years.
He also cited Microsoft as an example, pointing out that from Office to Office 365 to Teams, office software has thrived during each technological transformation, achieving even more stable market positions than operating systems.
Competitive Landscape: Tencent WorkBuddy Leads, Three Giants Face Off
As ByteDance completes its reorganization, the competitive landscape in the AI office sector has begun to take shape. Currently, Tencent's WorkBuddy holds the leading position in this arena. According to Analysys data, in June, 17 mainstream desktop AI-native office agents in China generated over 60 million combined visits, with WorkBuddy recording 20.97 million monthly visits, ranking first. AI product ranking data shows that in July, WorkBuddy achieved 11.15 million monthly active users, also taking the top spot in the approximately 30 million-user AI office market. In Tencent's Q1 earnings report, Pony Ma described WorkBuddy as "China's most widely used efficiency AI agent service."
Tencent's market investment has also escalated significantly. Media estimates suggest that WorkBuddy's offline advertising spending across Beijing, Shanghai, Guangzhou, and Shenzhen alone has approached 100 million yuan, with large-scale WorkBuddy campaigns appearing in airport corridors and pillars across Shanghai, Shenzhen, and Guangzhou. In July, Tencent also merged the QClaw product center into the cloud product division housing WorkBuddy, further concentrating AI office resources. Just 13 days before ByteDance's conference, Tencent held its first large-scale ecosystem conference since WorkBuddy's launch, where Tencent Cloud Vice President Liu Yi proposed positioning WorkBuddy as the "operating system of the agent era."
On the Alibaba front, early last month, the company consolidated QoderWork, MuleRun, and Wukong into "Qianwen Office," officially launching public beta testing with plans for full integration into DingTalk.
At this point, all three tech giants have completed or nearly completed internal consolidation of their AI office businesses. Tencent holds a first-mover advantage in traffic and monthly active user metrics, ByteDance signals its formal entry into the sprint phase with CEO endorsement and high-caliber integration completion, and Alibaba is nearing the finish line on its integration efforts. The battle for the AI office market targeting the vast enterprise customer base is now entering a phase of direct confrontation.