According to a research report from China Securities Co., Ltd., AI coding has been the primary driver of AI commercialization growth since the start of the year, with Anthropic and OpenAI's combined annualized revenue now estimated to exceed $100 billion. However, as coding penetration rates rise, the market is now searching for the next high-potential application scenario.
The brokerage believes that AI office scenarios hold significant potential and could bring AI into the mass market, expanding the potential user base from millions of programmers to over one billion white-collar workers. Domestic tech giants are strategically prioritizing this space: Tencent took an early lead by launching WorkBuddy in March, Alibaba has consolidated three products to launch Qianwen Office, and ByteDance has integrated Feishu into Doubao, officially unveiling the Doubao Work brand. Looking ahead, the office sector is poised to become the next wave of platform-level products and a new traffic gateway in the B2B market.
Why is the office Agent the next major AI application direction after Coding?
First, the potential audience is vast: there are over one billion knowledge workers globally, far exceeding the roughly 50 million programmers, and in an optimistic scenario, AI office solutions could create a trillion-dollar market. Second, both BAT (ByteDance, Alibaba, Tencent) and global model providers are converging on this space: overseas, major model companies have been deploying early, with Anthropic first launching Claude Cowork, OpenAI's Codex rapidly catching up with over 20 million weekly active users, and xAI recently introducing Grok Bot. Domestically, BAT holds stronger ecosystem advantages, with Tencent releasing WorkBuddy in March and achieving a clear first-mover edge with over 10 million monthly uses, Alibaba launching Qianwen Office, and ByteDance integrating Feishu into Doubao, with attention focused on Trae Work and the Doubao desktop client. Third, this represents the essential path for AI to expand from the high-end market to the mass market: the brokerage believes that all white-collar users who work on computers are potential users. Moreover, AI office solutions have strong extensibility; beyond foundational model capabilities, what matters most is the Harness layer (product capabilities) and ecosystem coordination (MCP/Skill). Taking Tencent's WorkBuddy as an example, it connects product data across Tencent Docs, Tencent Meeting, and IMA, weaving together a complete enterprise workflow.
The platform trend for office Agents is clear, with domestic and international momentum aligning and user bases growing rapidly.
Domestically, WorkBuddy's monthly visits have grown from 9 million in March to over 20 million in June, ranking first among domestic office Agents. Internationally, ChatGPT Work launched in June and integrated with Codex, with weekly active users surging from 6 million to 10 million within two weeks and exceeding 20 million by August. Model providers, internet companies, and traditional office software vendors are all intensifying their efforts; since March, Tencent, Alibaba, and ByteDance have been rapidly undertaking organizational restructuring, resource integration, and product iterations, all focusing heavily on the office Agent productivity scenario.
Overall, Tencent currently leads the domestic office Agent market, with Alibaba and ByteDance also making significant pushes.
The product positioning of these three companies is similar, but their strategies differ slightly. Tencent has completed product integration first through WorkBuddy and leads in user scale, while leveraging its ecosystem of WeChat Official Accounts, Tencent Docs, and IMA to establish clear first-mover and ecosystem advantages. According to Tencent's earnings call, WorkBuddy's paying users demonstrate strong profitability, and Work Agent is positioned as an AI application product line expected to contribute both revenue and profit. Alibaba, through Qianwen Office, is integrating QoderWork, Wukong, and MuleRun, gradually addressing its previous shortcomings of fragmented entry points and disconnected capabilities. Notably, from a model invocation perspective, Alibaba currently shows a clear preference for Qianwen, and the switching cost between models is higher than for Tencent's product. ByteDance has integrated Feishu to launch the AI office brand "Doubao Work." At the end of July, the Feishu product team was merged into the Doubao product system, and more recently, TRAE and the Coze team also joined Doubao. On August 25, ByteDance officially launched its standalone Agent product and brand "Doubao Work" targeting productivity scenarios, deeply integrated with Feishu, enabling the Agent to complete tasks based on enterprise knowledge and work context within user permission scopes. Additionally, unlike Trae Work, Doubao Work currently shows a clear preference for its own models, similar to Qianwen Office, with the model selection module listing proprietary models. Overall, ByteDance is shifting from parallel exploration across multiple products to a centralized layout with Doubao as the unified AI gateway and Feishu providing the enterprise collaboration and knowledge foundation.
Investment recommendation: focus on major internet companies, which are likely to emerge as winners in the office Agent space.
The brokerage believes that the recent surge in Work Agents domestically and internationally differs from previously deployed Agents; office-focused Agents are moving toward platformization. Internet companies are proven winners in the platform economy, with rich experience and a stronger grasp of market dynamics, user insights, and profiling. The usability of office Agents is closely tied to the tools they can invoke, and major tech companies hold prominent advantages in areas such as instant messaging.