"99% of people resign because of Wu Zhao." Wu Zhao: "Entrepreneurs will choose to be with entrepreneurs."

Four months after returning to DingTalk, Wu Zhao, founder and CEO of DingTalk (whose real name is Chen Hang, with the Alibaba nickname "Wu Zhao"), has delivered his first report card for his "comeback to the industry."

"Long time no see, today I bring you the brand new DingTalk 8.0," Wu Zhao said on August 25th at DingTalk's 10th anniversary and new product launch event, diving straight into the topic without preamble. He simultaneously named DingTalk 8.0 as "AI DingTalk 1.0" – from the day Wu Zhao returned, the new DingTalk restarted its timeline.

Days before the launch event, what made headlines earlier than the new products was Wu Zhao's "midnight inspection" controversy. On August 19th, reports emerged that Wu Zhao patrolled workstations in the office area after midnight and questioned employees the next day about why they left work early. Subsequently, numerous resignation posts from DingTalk employees appeared on social media.

Multiple former DingTalk employees contacted revealed that DingTalk currently indeed has an extreme overtime culture. "99% (of employees) resign because of Wu Zhao."

The consistently tough Wu Zhao did not deny the "midnight inspections" in interviews, instead describing it as filtering for "like-minded people." He stated: "(This) is a question of whether to be an entrepreneur or just a worker. It's actually a mutual choice – entrepreneurs will choose to be with entrepreneurs."

During times of aggressive expansion, organizational growing pains can be tolerated, but require "battle achievements" to prove their legitimacy. Wu Zhao needs to produce a new DingTalk that can conquer 26 million enterprise organizations and 700 million users, while also shouldering the responsibility of being Alibaba's super portal for its AI-to-B strategy.

Wu Zhao was once an excellent product manager, but facing AI, he too is a newcomer.

**Remaking DingTalk**

To explain DingTalk AI 1.0, Wu Zhao used over 200 PPT slides at the event, showcasing more than ten AI products included in the new version over 2 hours: AI office interaction "DingTalk ONE," AI transcription, AI search, AI spreadsheets, and DingTalk's first AI recording hardware "DingTalk A1."

This also confirmed Wu Zhao's ambition for DingTalk is definitely not just "patching." Besides "midnight inspections," he has also led his team in analyzing 1,850 user requirements over 4 months, fixed 574 user feedback issues, and comprehensively transformed over 20 product lines.

Can Wu Zhao lead DingTalk to victory again this time?

After four years away, the excited and urgent Wu Zhao is full of energy, immediately starting to "roll up his sleeves" upon return: "Everyone says I'm a workaholic, but I'm quite excited because whenever I think about AI, I feel the world is about to change."

Without giving the team time to adapt, Wu Zhao quickly proposed "returning to entrepreneurship, returning to innovation, returning to user-first."

Within DingTalk, Wu Zhao established more than ten innovation groups, each responsible for an AI scenario or tool. His requirement for innovation groups is "rapid iteration": DingTalk overall should maintain weekly iterations, with AI scenarios and tools having a key update every two weeks.

Reshaping products starts with concepts. How to remake work methods with AI? Wu Zhao, who enjoys disruptive thinking, first proposed a "non-consensus": don't just think about using AI for efficiency, but treat AI as the subject and help it understand the physical world.

AI DingTalk 1.0, bearing strong Wu Zhao thought and style, has many designs that excite the industry.

For example, "DingTalk ONE" as DingTalk AI's core product is completed by multiple Agent teams collaborating on office processes. Wu Zhao compared DingTalk ONE with past DingTalk interfaces, explaining that the key change is "proactivity."

In the past, when users handled all work on DingTalk, they had to design priorities themselves, and each task required giving AI assistants prompts. DingTalk ONE will automatically sort the to-do list by importance and urgency, proactively handling some simple work.

DingTalk's first AI recording hardware DingTalk A1 also unexpectedly drew enthusiastic market response. At the launch event, Wu Zhao spent nearly 5 minutes specifically playing videos related to DingTalk A1.

DingTalk A1 is a slim recording card that can be placed in a card sleeve and magnetically attached to the phone's back. Pressing the start button enables real-time recording, recognition conversion, and AI summarization, priced at 799 yuan per unit. The DingTalk A1 demonstration booth was surrounded by crowds, and before the launch event ended, the demonstration devices were already depleted of battery.

Although similar products have existed domestically and internationally, such as overseas AI recording hardware pioneer Plaud launching Plaud Note AI smart recording card in June 2023, and Mobvoi releasing TicNote in June 2025 priced at 1,199-1,799 yuan, DingTalk A1 still has advantages to rely on with DingTalk ecosystem and rich software. "Comparing with similar industry products, you can see DingTalk A1's configuration is top-tier," Wu Zhao said.

Recently, AI spreadsheets have been hotly contested in the office market. Feishu CEO Xie Xin publicly challenged in media: "Feishu's multi-dimensional tables lead DingTalk by at least 12 months."

DingTalk AI spreadsheets also completed important upgrades, jointly building a new storage-computing integrated architecture – O-Table – with Alibaba Cloud database team. At the launch event, Wu Zhao didn't forget to counterattack: "Our time is 11.6 seconds, while another very excellent competitor needs 26 seconds."

**Friction and Integration**

"We are determined to clear the past and create a brand new DingTalk for the AI era with a zero-reset mindset," Wu Zhao said. "Brand new" means demolition and reconstruction. Releasing an "AI family bucket" containing more than ten AI products in one breath, DingTalk's work intensity over these four months can be imagined.

Wu Zhao's joke at the launch event was viewed by outsiders as a response to "midnight inspections": "DingTalk colleagues actually don't only have work as everyone imagines, we also have exciting lives."

But Wu Zhao and DingTalk employees, reunited at the AI crossroads, have become "the most familiar strangers." The founder's excitement often fails to resonate with employees.

According to sources, after Wu Zhao regained control of DingTalk, he made numerous adjustments in organizational management including attendance and performance setting. "Although it's not as exaggerated as staying until midnight every day, morning meetings must start at 9 AM, and evening meetings are still held at 9 PM," said Chen Yihang, a former DingTalk middle platform employee.

To "tackle" the new DingTalk, Wu Zhao established more than ten innovation groups. Most projects these groups work on require confidentiality, with development progress reporting directly to Wu Zhao and requiring iteration frequency measured in weeks. Chen Yihang revealed that overtime until dawn mostly occurred in confidential departments.

In organizational structure, Wu Zhao rebuilt the data engineering team and established model training teams and effectiveness evaluation teams. But not all employees can adapt to such massive adjustments.

Chen Yihang told sources that his department once had over 100 people. After Wu Zhao's return, the "+2" and "+3" level supervisors were completely disrupted and reorganized. "Previous structure names were completely abandoned. I was assigned to a business team. My '+1' level supervisor originally managed 20 people, now only has a few people, and doesn't do the original work. After adjustments, those who could leave all left. My '+1' and '+2' level supervisors were good bosses, but they all resigned in the end."

There are also some changes and decisions whose intentions are difficult for employees to understand.

Cheng Weixiong worked at Alibaba for over four years, experiencing Wu Zhao's departure from Alibaba in 2021, Bu Qiong taking over as CEO, and Wu Zhao's return in 2025. "With Wu Zhao's return, we thought he would bring disruptive products. We didn't expect his first move would be to purge internal employees."

Cheng Weixiong worked in technical R&D and marketing at DingTalk. Many employees in his department responsible for user acquisition had contracts expiring in July-August, and DingTalk's renewal conditions were: attract one customer from Feishu and pass a Python programming language test.

According to his introduction, many unrelated departments were assigned Python tests. "But it's absolutely not testing for the sake of testing – it's completely a 'compliance test.' Employees have no way to complete the test based on daily experience or work experience."

Cheng Weixiong's department's user acquisition KPI was also directly doubled from last year's baseline. "Requirements to upgrade customers from regular levels to more active paid renewal levels. How can technical teams accomplish this?"

In his view, Wu Zhao's strict control over attendance, employee assessment, and lunch break time after returning is "forcing employees to leave."

Multiple employees reported to sources that DingTalk S1 is about to enter performance season and renewal season. Many employees with resignation intentions are uncertain whether S1 will result in poor performance ratings of 3.25 or 3.5 – these metrics are key indicators for whether they can "return" to Alibaba in the future, so many employees choose to resign at this time.

According to Phoenix Technology, a DingTalk employee who left at the end of June recalled that DingTalk went from a peak of over 1,900 people in March-April to only over 1,700 when he left, "now it should be 1,600 people, with three to four hundred people leaving."

**Mid-game Battle with Feishu**

Although employee dissatisfaction is no longer a secret inside and outside DingTalk, from Wu Zhao's perspective, this can be transformed into another story.

Wu Zhao obviously paused three times while introducing AI products to wait for audience applause. "I heard someone wanted to clap, so I waited," he said. His satisfaction with AI DingTalk 1.0 was hard to conceal.

Wu Zhao also mentioned in interviews that he believes current DingTalk employees have limited and arrogant understanding of AI. At the launch event, Wu Zhao didn't hesitate to actively mention: when he just returned in April, customer service department employees told him customer renewal rates were high, human transfer rates were only 15%, and five-star ratings reached 99%. But after a round of customer visits, Wu Zhao received customer feedback like "needs submitted a year ago still unresolved" and "can't find human customer service entry."

Over the past few years, DingTalk's products and organization indeed had problems with bloating and slow decision-making. Sources close to DingTalk revealed that current DingTalk is called "Alibaba's Myanmar," but two years ago DingTalk "lived quite comfortably, could be called Alibaba's Nordic region."

Such situations, in the eyes of Wu Zhao who experienced four years of hard entrepreneurship, perhaps don't fit.

At the launch event, Wu Zhao said DingTalk ten years ago was "rich second generation entrepreneurship" – just focus on making good products without worrying about administration, finance, HR, and legal affairs. His self-created "Two Hydrogen One Oxygen" was completely "starting from scratch." He learned to be "stingy" in entrepreneurship – to save electricity, the company's three elevators only operated one, and air conditioning was absolutely not used above 0 degrees or below 30 degrees.

Moreover, unlike 2015 when DingTalk relied on products to "pierce the sky with one needle," current DingTalk is experiencing brutal external industry competition. The office software "three-kingdom battle" is becoming increasingly fierce, with DingTalk and Feishu engaged in "close combat."

In June, DingTalk first announced multi-dimensional tables would be free, then released AI tables in July. Feishu, just one day later, announced at its launch event that Feishu multi-dimensional tables would be available on Tencent Enterprise WeChat and DingTalk platforms.

From external perspective, DingTalk's market share loss is an undisputed fact. In recent years, DingTalk's original large customers like Xiaomi and Pop Mart have switched to Feishu. Even Xpeng Motors, in which Alibaba invested, has also adopted Feishu.

After returning for 4 months, Wu Zhao's solution in his first product is to make AI assistants move from passive response to proactive agency. Meanwhile, Wu Zhao is also expanding industry boundaries, announcing that AI DingTalk 1.0 will focus on three major scenarios: customer service, marketing, and education, creating AI customer service large models, AI marketing services, AI education and other products.

But facing the future, when asked how he views competitors, Wu Zhao said: What competitors are there in the AI era? We're just at AI DingTalk 1.0 version now, everyone is starting from zero.

(Chen Yihang and Cheng Weixiong are pseudonyms)