ByteDance and Alibaba Unite AI Work Tools for Enterprise Market

Illustration of ByteDance's office. ByteDance and Alibaba are starting to unite AI-based work tools to target the paid enterprise market. Photo: ByteDance web screenshot.

JAKARTA - ByteDance and Alibaba are beginning to unite artificial intelligence (AI) based work tools. The two Chinese internet giants are no longer just chasing general users, but are starting to target the paid enterprise market.

Yicai Global, quoted Tuesday, August 4, reported that ByteDance Technology and Alibaba Group Holding began integrating AI-based office products to accelerate the commercialization of AI applications.

At ByteDance, the Feishu product team and AI assistant Doubao will be merged into a new Doubao product team. The team is led by Doubao Director Zhao Qi.

The Beijing-based company announced the change on July 30. After the restructuring, Feishu's head Xie Xin will report to Zhao.

Alibaba is also moving in a similar direction. On July 27, the company merged its three agent products, namely QoderWork, Wukong, and MuleRun, into a new product called QwenWork.

Alibaba uses QoderWork as a foundation. Wukong and MuleRun capabilities are then included to build a stronger AI product for the company's productivity needs.

AI agents are AI-based systems that can help carry out certain tasks, not just answer questions. In the world of work, AI agents can be used to help collaborate, organize work, and complete business tasks.

Industry analyst Zhang Shule told Yicai, one of the main goals of the integration of the productivity ecosystem by the internet giant is commercialization.

According to Zhang, the versatile AI model developed by major technology companies is aimed at office use. However, the new enterprise market can be worked on more deeply if the model is combined with each company's work platform.

With that pattern, technology companies can move from consumer users to a larger enterprise market for paid mobile office solutions.

ByteDance's restructuring also touches the business side. The Go-To-Market or GTM Feishu team, which handles marketing, sales, and customer service, will be merged with Volcano Engine.

Volcano Engine is ByteDance's unit that handles cloud computing and the company's technology services.

The two will form a new GTM unit that focuses on business. The unit oversees marketing, sales, and customer service for ByteDance's cloud services, including the Model-as-a-Service and Software-as-a-Service businesses.

Model-as-a-Service is a service that accesses AI models through a cloud platform. Software-as-a-Service is a software service that is used over the internet without having to be fully installed on the user's device.

Volcano Engine's head Tan Dai will lead the new unit. Feishu's sales director Lin Chan and Feishu's strategy and marketing head Shi Zhijun will report to him.

An internal source of Feishu said that after the merger, Volcano Engine will be responsible for the MaaS business. Feishu will use Doubao to provide productivity solutions at the product level.

According to the source, the restructuring was carried out to reduce overlapping work and waste of resources.

Feishu is also considered to be able to break out of the relatively low market limit of traditional office software. With Doubao, Feishu can build an AI-based productivity solution.

Yicai Global said Alibaba's QwenWork has started to be tested on a small scale and has launched a local desktop client.

QwenWork's next plan is to release a web version and an embedded version in DingTalk, Alibaba's Hangzhou-based work collaboration platform.

Senior Analyst at Analysys, Chen Chen, said the competition for AI office agents will be determined by the ability to work in real business scenarios.

The quality and reliability of the completion of the task will be the differentiator.

According to Chen, enterprise-level capabilities are also becoming more important. This includes team collaboration, tiered permission management, reuse of business knowledge, security, and compliance.

He said the market for AI office applications will move towards deeper integration with the collaborative work ecosystem.

Chen also assessed that the company's procurement channel will be open as policies for AI agents improve and national standards for agent interconnection protocols are implemented.

According to Chen, the path to gradually turning consumer users into paid users can begin to take shape next year.