ByteDance’s AI push just took its most concrete organisational turn yet. On 30 July, according to Phoenix Tech, the company sent an internal memo announcing that its Feishu (Lark) product team and its Doubao model product team will be merged into a new Doubao product unit, led by Doubao head Zhao Qi, with Feishu head Xie Xin reporting to him.
Separately, Feishu’s go-to-market team – covering marketing, sales and customer service – will be merged with the Volcano Engine cloud team into a new ToB GTM organisation called the ‘Creativity Service Platform,’ which will own the market, sales and customer-service functions for ByteDance’s MaaS and SaaS cloud services.
Feishu’s existing products and services stay unchanged, and Feishu will collaborate more deeply with Doubao in productivity scenarios. The move plays to ByteDance’s long-standing strength: product and operations. When Doubao Pro launched in June, some Feishu capability was already folded in; this organisational merger is the next step, using ByteDance’s best card to fix its weak spot in the hard fight for enterprise AI office software.
The trigger is competitive heat. Almost daily, China’s AI vendors are shipping moves. Alibaba merged three agent products – QoderWork, Wukong and MuleRun – into ‘Qianwen Office,’ placed under new DingTalk CEO Chen Yusen. Tencent moved its QClaw business and team into the WorkBuddy system, concentrating resources on flagship products. Huawei took the most radical path: its Xiao Yi assistant has been HarmonyOS’s unified AI entry point across all scenarios since birth, leaving no room for fragmentation.
The AI-office market has become a strategic high ground that the big players are all chasing. Demand is deterministic, willingness to pay is high, and retention is strong – making it the ideal ground to capture AI market share, accumulate AI data and accelerate product evolution. ByteDance is all in, and further moves are surely coming.
Source (Chinese original): Sohu IT
Translated and adapted from Sohu IT (it.sohu.com).