Zhang Yiming made a rare public appearance, and ByteDance is poised to launch a major initiative.

Whether Doubao can smoothly expand its B-side business and grow into ByteDance's another "core backbone" after Douyin still remains to be tested by time. But Zhang Yiming has drawn a clear roadmap for it: even at the cost of temporary backwardness in stages, the company must win an AI era access ticket with original core and long-term value.

01

ByteDance's AI strategy has been extremely clear

The AI wave is surging in full swing, and major tech giants are taking continuous actions. Even Zhang Yiming, who has rarely appeared in public for a long time, made a rare public appearance recently.

Multiple sources show that two weeks ago, Zhang Yiming, founder of ByteDance, told the "Seed" AI research team at an internal meeting to avoid distilling models from competitors.

The so-called distillation refers to using advanced large models on the market to train one's own smaller models. Distillation can improve model capabilities in a short period of time at a relatively low cost, which is a tacit "shortcut" widely known in the industry. By giving up the distillation method to accelerate progress, ByteDance's models may fall behind its competitors in the short term.

But Zhang Yiming does not care about this. He believes that relying on distillation will hinder real technological breakthroughs, and building real capabilities requires "long-termism and delayed gratification, rather than using others' achievements to obtain short-term rankings on public leaderboards". He also told the Seed team that the company should be willing to "sacrifice some short-term gains for long-term goals".

This move by Zhang Yiming has drawn widespread public attention because he rarely makes public statements. After Liang Rubo took over as CEO of ByteDance in 2021, Zhang Yiming no longer participated in the company's daily management. But in fact, he has been keeping a close eye on ByteDance's AI business. The Paper reported that since the second half of last year, Zhang Yiming has regularly attended review and discussion meetings of the Seed core technical team. "He is not in China most of the time, so we barely see him. The AI department is the one he cares about and interacts with the most," a Douyin employee told *Finance World*.

That is exactly why Zhang Yiming's statement is regarded as an internal "tone-setting" move. For the company's long-term goals, he has set a relatively "slow" pace, which fully demonstrates his emphasis on AI. This emphasis has been transmitted to the business side of ByteDance.

On the morning of August 6, ByteDance held its mid-year All Hands meeting, a regular company-wide assembly held internally. Originally held once a year, the meeting has evolved from a relatively low-key internal communication event in the early years to a key occasion for strategy release and corporate culture promotion. In January this year, ByteDance held its first all-hands meeting in 2026, and more than half a year later, the rare second all-hands meeting within the same year was held again.

Liang Rubo said the company summarized the principles for formulating business strategies as "high priority, core backbone, long-term optimization". "High priority" refers to creating incremental social value; "core backbone" means focusing energy on a small number of particularly important and closely connected matters; "long-term optimization" means putting users first and taking incremental social value as the core, without being shaken by short-term fluctuations. Specifically for the AI business, this means believing in AGI (Artificial General Intelligence) and adhering to independent research and development.

This seems to be a remote response to Zhang Yiming's proposal of "no distillation": Zhang Yiming set the tone for ByteDance's AGI goals and development pace, and this mid-year all-hands meeting provided further explanations for it, putting forward the company's specific action program for the next step.

The senior executives attending this all-hands meeting are also different from those of last year. The executives who attended the meeting in July 2025 included Liang Rubo, CEO and Chairman of ByteDance, Shou Zi Chew, CEO of TikTok, and Han Shangyou, President of Douyin and head of its department. At this meeting, in addition to executives including Liang Rubo and Shou Zi Chew, Zhao Qi, overall head of the Doubao product, and Tan Dai, head of the creative service platform department, were also present at the same time.

An internal ByteDance employee told *Finance World* that the all-hands meeting was held in the form of online video, and the keyword "AI" appeared frequently in the speeches of senior executives. He was both surprised and understanding about the presence of Zhao Qi and other related personnel. "AI is the top strategy." In his view, after the recent organizational restructuring, Xie Xin, head of Feishu, a veteran who joined ByteDance back in Zhang Yiming's era, now also reports to Zhao Qi, which fully illustrates the group's emphasis on AI.

Not long ago, on July 30, ByteDance carried out an organizational restructuring targeting the AI business. The Feishu product team and the Doubao product team will be integrated to form a new Doubao product team, led by Zhao Qi, head of Doubao, and Xie Xin, head of Feishu, will report to Zhao Qi. The Feishu GTM (marketing, sales, customer service) team and the Volcano Engine team will be integrated into the creative service platform, with Tan Dai overall in charge of the marketing, sales and customer service of ByteDance's cloud services including MaaS and SaaS.

This is the largest-scale restructuring of ByteDance's B-side business since the company set up six major business units in 2021. At the all-hands meeting, Liang Rubo specifically explained the background of the recent integration of Doubao, Feishu and Volcano Engine. He said the development of AI in productivity is faster than expected, and To B business has become more important. More than 90% of Feishu's new customers have purchased Feishu AI products at the same time, and this integration is a preparation for better building high-quality products for office and productivity scenarios and better serving B-side customers under the huge opportunities brought by AI.

This means that behind the organizational integration, ByteDance's overall AI strategy is shifting from the C-side to the B-side, further raising the priority of the AI to B strategy.

In addition to releasing important signals on the AI strategy, this ByteDance all-hands meeting also released another important message — Douyin and Doubao are listed as the two "core backbones" of ByteDance. Liang Rubo said: "As a core backbone business, Douyin can support the development of e-commerce and local life services, and we hope Doubao will also become a core backbone business in the future."

Liang Rubo explained that the "core backbone" has another meaning: this business itself is large and very important, and it can also drive and support the development of other businesses. This means the company hopes Doubao can also empower more surrounding businesses, including search, e-commerce and office collaboration, to promote AI upgrading across all scenarios.

Among the two "core backbone" businesses, Douyin's achievements are obvious to all. Doubao, which is at the same level as Douyin, will undoubtedly become the most critical part of ByteDance's future AI strategy.

02

The Hidden Card Prepared for the Next 10 Years

At the mid-year All Hands meeting, Zhao Qi took a seat at the "main table", which means ByteDance's expectations for Doubao are no longer limited to just a large model application.

Zhao Qi, a doctor of computer science from Peking University, joined ByteDance in 2017. He used to serve as the head of the growth middle platform, then the head of the AI line under the group's human resources system, before taking over the management of Doubao. As of June this year, data from QuestMobile shows that Doubao's monthly active users have reached 382 million, holding an absolute leading advantage on the C-side. Now that Zhao Qi has taken over the management of the Doubao product team, it means he will be the key figure in ByteDance's campaign of shifting to B-side AI business.

ByteDance's determination to invest in AI has long been felt by both internal employees and the public. A ByteDance employee revealed to *Finance World* that every department now needs to rely on AI to improve efficiency, and the use of AI is also included in their performance assessment. At work, there is no specific upper limit for calls to internal AI tools and interfaces, and the company reimburses half of the experience fees for external AI products, which is about 100 US dollars per month. Regarding this integration, he believes the company is about to break through the "ceiling" of AI growth.

ByteDance previously specially released a set of impressive data to the public: as of June this year, the average daily Token call volume of the Doubao large model exceeded 180 trillion; internal calculations show that converted according to the average consumption in July, the ARR (Annual Recurring Revenue) of ByteDance's large model business has reached 4 billion US dollars. In the second quarter of 2026, more than 90% of Feishu's new customers purchased Feishu AI products at the same time.

However, while ByteDance's AI business is developing rapidly, there is also hidden anxiety: there is a natural ceiling for C-side user growth, and "supporting" the operation of Doubao is also a non-negligible cost pressure. To B has become the real incremental market for AI, but Doubao, which holds an absolute leading advantage on the C-side, needs to speed up its pace in the enterprise service sector.

Although ByteDance has sufficient capital and computing power, the C-side operation model still cannot afford the high cost of large models. *LatePost* reported that in the first half of the year, Doubao's daily revenue was less than 1 million yuan, mainly from e-commerce commissions, while the daily computing power cost could reach tens of millions of yuan. Therefore, the commercialization of Doubao has been put on the agenda by ByteDance. Despite the public debates in the market, Doubao launched its professional version in June, targeting complex office and productivity scenarios, with tiered pricing plans: the standard package costs 68 yuan for continuous monthly subscription, the enhanced package costs 200 yuan for continuous monthly subscription, and the premium package costs 500 yuan for continuous monthly subscription.

In fact, shifting the focus of AI strategy to the B-side is also the current consensus in the AI industry. In the past, cloud services and office software were separated in the enterprise IT architecture, but in the Agent era, everything has changed: what tools an enterprise uses for office work means it will use the models and cloud services of the corresponding provider. Many major tech giants have been eyeing this market, and are accelerating the integration of To B business lines, pushing office scenarios to the forefront of the AI battlefield: Alibaba has integrated the capabilities of QoderWork, Wukong and MuleRun into Tongyi Work, and Tencent has also raised the strategic position of WorkBuddy to a new level.

It is inevitable for ByteDance to launch a competition in the B-side market, and the leading entry is still Doubao. Previously, Feishu has been deeply engaged in collaborative office for 10 years. When Feishu wants to develop AI functions and Doubao also penetrates into office scenarios, operating separately on both sides will undoubtedly cause internal resource consumption. In the AI era, the entry for enterprise-level applications has evolved into a unified entry for agents. From this logic, Feishu can only inject its understanding and capabilities of office scenarios into Doubao.

ByteDance's To B business includes Feishu and Volcano Engine, each with its own sales team and performance assessment indicators. Enterprises go to Feishu when they need collaborative office tools, and go to Volcano Engine when they need cloud and model services. Now ByteDance has established the creative service platform, bringing all of them under the same unified export.

After the adjustment was announced, many users found that a new "Doubao" menu bar appeared at the bottom of the Feishu App on their mobile phones. Behind this, the Doubao Enterprise version has started internal testing for some Feishu customers. The Doubao Enterprise version not only has the capabilities of general AI productivity tools, but also is natively integrated with the Feishu ecosystem. Users can connect all office scenarios including Feishu Docs, Sheets, Meetings and group chats without additional deployment, and support accurate Q&A and intelligent creation based on the enterprise's own knowledge base.

"Doubao and Feishu are integrated into one, ByteDance is going to do something big," commented an industry insider. From the horse-racing mechanism to joint operations, the AI competition among major tech giants has entered the deep water zone, and office Agents have become the key battlefield.

This is the hidden card ByteDance has prepared for the next 10 years. What Doubao is fighting for is the competition for the entry of AI into enterprises in the future. Whoever masters this entry can go deep into the enterprise's permission system, knowledge base and business processes, and build the deepest competitive moat.

03

"Great Efforts Bring Unexpected Breakthroughs"

ByteDance has always adhered to the concept of "great efforts bring unexpected breakthroughs", and is one of the companies that attach the most importance to AI in China. Now it has placed heavy bets, gathered the scattered To B resources, and concentrated its firepower to win this battle. While AI is gradually blurring the boundaries of products and business logic between B-side businesses, ByteDance is using the will of the organization to force related businesses to move towards collaboration.

For Liang Rubo, this is also an advancement in his management philosophy for ByteDance. With the expansion of the organizational scale and the increase in the number of employees, how to manage the organization efficiently and prevent the "big company disease" is a problem he has been thinking about all the time.

*Finance World* has sorted out the content of ByteDance's All Hands meetings over the years. In 2022, shortly after taking over as CEO of ByteDance, Liang Rubo focused on reflecting on the problem of organizational bloat. At that time, ByteDance had been established for 10 years and had grown into a large company with more than 100,000 employees, and Liang Rubo wrote "reducing redundancy and improving efficiency" into his management goals.

At the 2024 all-hands meeting, Liang Rubo said that as ByteDance grew larger, it "had all the big company diseases that it should have". He admitted that ByteDance as an organization was becoming mediocre, especially after the emergence of ChatGPT, which made him feel that ByteDance had lost the "sensitivity" it had once been proud of. In June this year, Liang Rubo also released an all-hands letter after a four-year interval, updating 10 leadership principles, adding "do high-value work" and "dare to set ambitious goals"; listing "maintain a sense of crisis and keep an external perspective" and "go deep into the front line" as independent entries.

At this mid-year all-hands meeting, Liang Rubo further explained that the background for updating the leadership principles is that facing the new AI wave and opportunities, as well as the challenges encountered in the current stage of organizational development, he hopes to clarify "what kind of attitude and path we should take to move forward". When an employee asked about the standards for outstanding talents in the AI era, Liang Rubo said that the most important thing is the ability to use AI to create value. Outstanding talents need to be able to discover value, define problems, coordinate resources and create value, and make full use of AI to improve efficiency in this process.

ByteDance's organizational restructuring seems to be an annotation for this principle. Xie Xin, head of Feishu, is a veteran of ByteDance. Back in 2014 when ByteDance only had 300 employees, he served as the company's first head of HR. Now, he no longer reports directly to Liang Rubo, but reports to Zhao Qi instead. Relying on the outstanding performance of Doubao, Zhao Qi has taken on the heavy responsibility of leading the future development of the Doubao product team. This change shows that in ByteDance, AI takes priority over everything, including seniority of veteran employees.

Of course, Zhao Qi also has a heavy burden on his shoulders in the future. He needs to combine Doubao's AI capabilities with the landing scenarios of enterprise office work. However, the business and product logic of the B-side is different from that of the C-side. Enterprise customers do not need a "understanding chat partner", but office tools that can work reliably without errors. The old measurement standards such as daily active users and ARR in the past will no longer be applicable, and the commercialization of the B-side focuses on indicators such as customer renewal rate and ARPU (Average Revenue Per User).

Whether Doubao can successfully integrate B-side businesses and become ByteDance's real "core backbone" remains to be seen in the future. But combining the full