Exclusive | ByteDance further integrates its AI applications: Skylark is merged into Jimeng

Written by | Deng Yongyi

Edited by | Zhang Yuxin

"Intelligent Emergence" has learned from insiders that Jianying has recently completed an internal business integration, where the AI short drama creation platform Skylark was merged into the intelligent creation platform Jimeng, and the product still retains an independent entry.

We understand that this adjustment is mainly for resource integration, and Jimeng has now accessed the short drama-related capabilities of Skylark. After the adjustment, the operation of Skylark is taken charge of by Chen Xinran, the head of operation and marketing of Jimeng, and the product team remains unchanged.

The main reasons for this round of business integration of Jianying are limited growth space and the need to focus resources. A former Jianying employee told "Intelligent Emergence" that although AI-native products such as Jimeng and Skylark still maintain growth, user growth has not been effectively converted into returns matching the investment, and the rise of a large number of video Agent products in the market is also continuously compressing the differentiation space of self-owned products.

More important behind this round of adjustment is the following background: after large manufacturers refocus their efforts on basic models, all of them have re-evaluated the priority of AI applications. ByteDance is the fastest and most radical large manufacturer among them — besides the merger of the Jimeng and Skylark teams, they are also discussing the possibility of merging other AI products.

Only two years ago, Jimeng carried ByteDance's another expectation for AI applications.

At the beginning of 2024, Zhang Nan stepped down as CEO of Douyin Group and turned to be in charge of Jianying and CapCut. In May of the same year, Jianying launched Jimeng. At that time, Sora came out unexpectedly, and there was no clear answer about whether AI video products or Chatbot would become the next super application or entry — that was why ByteDance invested in both Doubao and Jimeng at the same time. Zhang Nan also publicly stated, "We hope Jimeng is not just a creation tool, but also can explore the content community in the AI era."

After that, the product focus of Jimeng has changed several times. At the initial stage of project establishment, Jimeng envisioned a division of labor similar to that of Jianying and Douyin: the Web end serves as a creation tool, and the App end carries consumption; after the launch of the Seedance model, the App end also tried Sora-like real-person on-screen presentation and digital avatar interaction.

With the improvement of model capabilities, many ordinary users can complete AI creation on Douyin and Doubao. Therefore, the product capabilities carried by Jimeng have extended from text-to-video and image-to-video to Agent editing capabilities such as setting the first and last keyframes and intelligent canvas, gradually moving closer to professional creators.

According to the understanding of "Intelligent Emergence", before this year's National Day, Jimeng had reduced the investment in the App end, promoted the integration of the App and Web ends, and in the future resources will be concentrated on the Web end for professional creators. After that, Jimeng will also increase investment in its overseas version Dreamina and promote commercialization.

In the past two years, model capabilities have improved rapidly, and the market's evaluation logic for applications has also changed accordingly. After Coding Agent opened up the AI office market, the statement of "model as application" has become increasingly mainstream. After ByteDance launched Seedance 2.0 in February 2026, the relationship between models and applications within the system has also undergone subtle changes.

Long before the release of Seedance 2.0, there was a phenomenon that Skylark, Jimeng, Jianying and Doubao competed for the right of first release of Seedance. A Volcano Engine employee told "Intelligent Emergence" that this situation has become more intense after the release of 2.0 — the model has become the party with stronger discourse power.

Limited product growth has also indirectly led to the "entrepreneurship boom" of the Jianying ecosystem in the past two years, a number of senior product and operation executives have left to start their own businesses one after another, including Chen Mian (former head of global commercialization and operation of Jianying and CapCut), Ming Chaoping (head of mobile editing of Jianying), Nao Nao (product manager of Jianying), Zhang Qizhi (head of products of Jianying), etc. At the end of 2024, we also exclusively reported that Zhang Xiaoran, head of Jianying products, left her job and later joined Flova.ai, the startup company of Guo Lie, the founder of the original Jianying.

At the same time, Volcano Engine is vigorously developing the MaaS service of Seedance, and almost all video Agent and short drama/manhua drama workflows in China are connected to Seedance. We understand that on the Seedance series of models, the revenue brought by Volcano Engine MaaS service is far higher than that of products such as Jimeng and Skylark.

This has directly changed ByteDance's logic of measuring the value of its own AI applications. When a large number of video applications in the market can access the model and find paying users, self-owned AI video applications such as Skylark and Jimeng need to prove: how much additional returns they can bring in customer acquisition, retention and monetization, and how much differentiation there is between each other?

Image Source | AI Generated

This article is from the WeChat official account "Intelligent Emergence", author: Deng Yongyi, published with authorization from 36Kr.