Even with an annual revenue of 3 billion yuan, Feishu has still been "incorporated" by Doubao.

Behind Feishu's integration into Doubao, the independent narrative of collaborative office is fading away.

At 9:30 a.m. on July 30, most Feishu employees had just arrived at their workstations when an all-staff email caused an immediate stir inside the company: effective immediately, Feishu will be integrated into Doubao and Volcano Engine (hereinafter referred to as "Volcano").

On the product side, the entire Feishu product team will be merged into Doubao, under the charge of Zhao Qi, the head of Doubao, while Xie Xin, the head of Feishu, will report to Zhao Qi. Feishu's GTM (marketing, sales, customer service) team will be integrated with Volcano Engine to form a new "Creativity Service Platform", which will be fully responsible for the marketing, sales and customer service of ByteDance's cloud services including MaaS and SaaS, under the charge of Tan Dai, the head of Volcano Engine.

In short, Feishu is split into two parts: product capabilities go to Doubao, and sales capabilities go to Volcano. Feishu's existing products and services remain unchanged, and it has been downgraded from an independent business group to a capability component of the technical middle platform, with the team moving from the front stage to the back stage.

China Entrepreneur learned that this is not a sudden adjustment, and there have been traces of it both inside and outside Feishu for a long time.

As early as February 2026, there were rumors that Feishu would be merged into Volcano Engine. But China Entrepreneur learned that the sudden arrival of the lobster trend pushed Feishu's performance to a new high, and the rumors disappeared. In March this year, Feishu announced a major upgrade of its AI product Aily at its new product launch event. However, subsequent Feishu press conferences and function iterations have all been carried out in the form of "live online broadcasts", and the "Infinite Future Conference", which has been held annually since 2023, was not held this year.

From the user's perspective, more and more Doubao elements have been integrated into Feishu's interface.

China Entrepreneur learned that the "Doubao Enterprise Edition", which was launched in late June, was developed with in-depth participation of the Feishu product team, and has been in internal beta testing for some Feishu customers. Sources say that Doubao has long been built into Feishu accounts within ByteDance. In mid-July, the "Knowledge Q&A" function on Feishu's interface was also automatically switched to Doubao.

Since the development of Lark, Xie Xin has led Feishu for a full 10 years. Feishu was once one of ByteDance's fastest-implementing AI products, and its strategic priority has been raised again and again. However, as the "horse race" for large companies' AI-to-C portals comes to an end, all parties are shifting resources to new battlefields: the portals of desktop Agents — large models, agents, and desktop collaboration tools, the three business lines are increasingly overlapping.

Source: AI-generated

"A business with an ARR (Annual Recurring Revenue) of several billion yuan a year that cannot become a portal can only maximize its value by merging with Doubao and Volcano," industry insider Akai commented.

Relevant ByteDance insiders revealed that maintaining the leading edge of the Doubao large model is the origin of all ByteDance's current businesses. Meanwhile, the competition in the AI office sector is becoming increasingly fierce.

China Office Agent Platform Market Insight Report shows that in June this year, WorkBuddy reached 20.97 million monthly visits, followed by ByteDance's TRAE IDE and Alibaba's QoderWork. WorkBuddy ranks first in terms of visits, exceeding the sum of the second and third place.

Media reports say that WorkBuddy has been defined as a "super project" within Tencent, with Ma Huateng personally overseeing its progress. On July 27, Alibaba's "Qwenwork" launched its internal beta test. On July 30, Qwenwork announced that it would hold a product demo live broadcast. According to media sources, its pricing plan is tightly aligned with WorkBuddy, with the standard edition and flagship edition priced 5 to 15 yuan lower respectively.

The advanced nature of products is never the only guarantee of business security. Now everyone has to answer one question: what contribution can you make to the company's overall leading position in AI?

Feishu is "cut twice"

"This is the largest adjustment to the To B business since ByteDance implemented the BU system," a person close to Feishu told China Entrepreneur. In 2021, Liang Rubo announced that Feishu had become an independent BU parallel to Douyin and Volcano Engine, and Feishu CEO Xie Xin reported directly to ByteDance CEO Liang Rubo.

In the latest internal email on July 30, Feishu was "cut twice".

The first cut falls on the product and personnel side. Xie Xin is "demoted" to report to Zhao Qi, which means that for the first time in the ten years since he took charge of Feishu, he is no longer independently responsible for the business. In fact, in September 2025, Tong Yao, the head of Feishu products, had already started to report to Zhao Qi in a dotted line. There is a precedent for similar separation of powers and responsibilities within ByteDance: for the B-end enterprise editions of products such as TRAE and Coze, the product side belongs to the Doubao system, and the commercial sales side falls under Volcano Engine.

The second cut falls on the sales side. After Feishu's GTM team is integrated with Volcano Engine, a new To B organization named "Creativity Service Platform" is established, under the unified management of Tan Dai. Lin Chan, Feishu's head of sales, and Shi Zhijun, Feishu's head of strategy and marketing, report to Tan Dai.

A ByteDance representative told China Entrepreneur that the term "creativity" comes from ByteDance's latest interpretation of its mission "to inspire creation and enrich life", "to achieve intelligence through computing, and to enhance creativity and experience through intelligence". A platform that carries the company's entire To B revenue is named after "creativity", which points to selling intelligence rather than selling software.

Before this "integration", many Feishu ecosystem components have been integrated into Doubao Enterprise Edition. Users do not need additional deployment to connect all office scenarios such as Feishu Docs, Sheets, Meetings, and group chats; it supports accurate Q&A and intelligent creation based on the enterprise's own knowledge base; and it is equipped with enterprise-level data isolation, permission control and security audit. Office, knowledge base and data are also the three most concerned things for enterprise clients.

Industry insider Akai said that ByteDance did not choose to build another "office version of Doubao", and the product logic is "do not reinvent the wheel".

"The core form of the next-generation AI office product is an Obsidian-style super knowledge middle platform superimposed with a WorkBuddy-like agent; traditional collaborative office has only four core values — address book, instant messaging, audio and video conferencing, online docs and multidimensional spreadsheets, and all other functions are non-core supporting modules."

Feishu brings a very generous "dowry" to Doubao: the enterprise-level agent platform Aily, multidimensional spreadsheets and Agents with monthly active users exceeding 10 million.

In exchange, Feishu gains the technical momentum of Doubao and the sales channels of Volcano Engine, transforming from a "BU under assessment" into the infrastructure of ByteDance's AI ecosystem. At the same time, the ceiling of independent expansion is inherently limited: Zhang Yi, founder of iiMedia Research, pointed out that Feishu "has a relatively single user circle, insufficient penetration in traditional industries, and insufficient development of the platform ecosystem".

So far, ByteDance has also built a complete portfolio picture in AI To B: Volcano Engine provides models, computing power and data platforms, Feishu provides scenarios, context and permission systems, and Doubao provides AI interaction. The computing power brain, underlying infrastructure, business scenarios and interaction carrier required by a set of productivity agents available for enterprise implementation have been fully connected across all domains.

Collaborative office is "disappearing"

An important background for Feishu's integration into Doubao is that collaborative office, as an independently valued and independently narrated business, is fading away. It either becomes the portal of large models, or becomes the command set called by Agents.

Recently, the focus of competition among large companies has shifted from the scale of C-end users to seizing the first interactive portal for enterprise AI. Data from Analysys shows that the total number of visits to 17 mainstream desktop AI office agents in June has exceeded 60 million. According to iiMedia Research's estimates, the domestic AI agent market size reached 80.4 billion yuan in 2025, and is expected to increase to 696.8 billion yuan in 2030.

Only a few core portals will remain in the industry in the end, and Alibaba and Tencent have already made early layouts to secure their positions.

In February this year, Tencent launched the office agent WorkBuddy, which received more than 8 million visits in the month of launch, and exceeded 13 million daily active users in July. On July 20, Tencent integrated the QClaw business team into the 6th Cloud Product Department, under the unified management of WorkBuddy.

Alibaba chose to integrate multiple AI product lines: combining QoderWork, the enterprise AI platform Wukong, and MuleRun into one, under the overall coordination of Chen Yusen, the new CEO of DingTalk. Qwenwork launched its internal beta test on July 27, with the desktop version going online first, followed by the web version and the embedded portal in DingTalk.

In addition to the portal competition, the competition in the collaborative office industry is increasingly focused on the "brain". The deep-seated changes in the industry are far more complex than a reshuffle of power — large model companies are crossing into the office scenario. In June, Moonshot AI released Kimi Work. After the 2.8 trillion-parameter K3 model was launched at the end of July, its context window was extended to 1 million Tokens. Native visual understanding and long-range programming capabilities are subsequently injected, making it the world's first interconnected platform of "multimodal model - workspace" with the longest context at present.

Source: AI-generated

Looking downstream, more and more office software is splitting itself into lines of commands for AI to call. The middle ground where the two ends converge is collaborative office, which is gradually becoming a "chicken rib" (something of little value).

Since late March, the CLI (Command Line Interface) of DingTalk, Feishu, and WeCom have been open sourced one after another, and Google Workspace and Obsidian have also successively launched CLIs. The logic behind this is that office software has admitted that it is changing from a "destination" to a "tool to be called".

On the same day that Feishu announced its split on July 30, DingTalk released the brand new "DingTalk CLI 2.0": 7 major capability domains including intelligent messages, schedule management, and document collaboration are fully open, containing more than 200 selected commands, 19 built-in structured AI Agent skills, and a 3-layer command architecture covering more than 2500 native API interfaces.

"The primary user of software is changing from humans to Agents," Akai commented. This will also be the future direction of many office collaboration software such as Feishu and DingTalk — separating documents, audio and video, IM, address book and identity authentication into independent CLIs.

Feishu will help Doubao generate revenue

In addition to the fact that Feishu's functions are increasingly difficult to exist independently, it is also an undeniable fact that Feishu and Doubao are bringing increasing financial pressure to ByteDance.

Xie Xin has repeatedly emphasized that Feishu's profit target will be extended to 2030, but according to China Entrepreneur, Feishu currently has about 4,000 employees, corresponding to an annual labor cost of 3.2 billion to 4 billion yuan.

According to reports from Caijing, Feishu's ARR in 2025 exceeded 3 billion yuan, and its ARR in the second quarter of 2026 increased by more than 100% year-on-year — but after superimposing costs such as computing power and marketing, Feishu still has a profit gap.

"If Feishu continues to use the old business model — the licensing model is likely to collapse," industry insiders believe that this problem is not unique to Feishu, but all software business models need to change from the original "selling tools" thinking to "selling results". "Any business model and business that requires you to explain to customers for a long time, takes months to implement, and customers will haggle the price down to the bone, is not a good business. WorkBuddy and Qwenwork have started charging from the first day they were born, and Feishu's merger into Doubao is actually a good outcome."

Multidimensional spreadsheets used to be Feishu's sharpest weapon — with monthly active users exceeding 10 million and a capacity of 10 million hot rows per table, a global first. Xie Xin once publicly claimed that it was "more than 12 months ahead of DingTalk" — but the "single-point victory" of this ace product cannot resolve ByteDance's AI anxiety.

In June 2025, DingTalk made multidimensional spreadsheets completely free, directly eliminating Feishu's product lead through a cost war; and in July of the same year, Feishu also opened up its multidimensional spreadsheets to DingTalk and WeCom — this is not so much an offensive as that no one's multidimensional spreadsheets can support their own independent portal.

On the other side of the coin, Doubao is also becoming ByteDance's "computing power bottomless pit" that needs strong backup.

According to reports from LatePost, Doubao, which had 200 million DAU in the first half of 2026, earns less than 1 million yuan per day, but consumes tens of millions of yuan in application computing power every day. In terms of computing power center construction, ByteDance plans to raise its capital expenditure in 2026 to more than 200 billion yuan, equivalent to 60% of its 2025 profits.

In June this year, despite complaints from many users, Doubao still launched its paid professional version: the standard package costs 68 yuan for continuous monthly subscription, the enhanced package costs 200 yuan for continuous monthly subscription, and the advanced package costs 500 yuan for continuous monthly subscription. The paid professional version is oriented to complex office and productivity scenarios, supporting operations on local computers, using browsers, calling Skills skills and scheduled tasks; and it has a built-in Office office suite, supporting professional image and video design, as well as application and website generation.

ByteDance's top priority is to prove to users that Doubao's paid professional version is worth the price.

"Feishu's commercial team is arguably the top tier with extremely high combat effectiveness among China's SaaS software teams, probably second only to Huawei, and stronger than Volcano Engine," Akai told China Entrepreneur.

Zhao Qi, the new head of Feishu's product side, is regarded as a well-known veteran in commercialization within ByteDance. After joining ByteDance in 2017, Zhao Qi took over one of ByteDance's most important commercial products — the Pangle advertising platform, responsible for safeguarding ByteDance's advertising revenue.