Has the thing that Tencent, Alibaba and ByteDance are most worried about happened?

In the domestic AI office market, DeepSeek has also started to grab market share.

Last night, DeepSeek Harness announced a set of quite impressive data: less than three months after its launch, its daily active users have reached 1.54 million, consuming about 92 trillion Tokens every day.

This achievement is much faster than I expected.

After all, the domestic AI office market is already crowded with major tech players. Tencent has WorkBuddy, Alibaba has Qianwen Office, ByteDance has Doubao Work, and Baidu has Dazi.

Compared with these products, DeepSeek Harness was launched relatively late. Although it already has two modes for office and coding that can complete common tasks such as documents, spreadsheets, PPTs and programming, there are still many areas to be improved in terms of function richness, product interface and user experience.

More critically, users currently usually need to pay for the API costs when using models on Harness, and the threshold for free use is much higher than that of several other competing products.

Even so, it still achieved 1.54 million daily active users.

If DeepSeek continues to improve its products and launch free quota or Agent Plan packages in the future, is it possible for it to break into the top three or even take the first place in the domestic AI office market?

01. Less than 3 months after launch, 1.54 million daily active users

Let's first take a look at the development speed of DeepSeek Harness.

On August 13 this year, DeepSeek Harness launched the v0.1 version, and officially released its desktop client on September 29. As of November 4, the number of daily active users has reached 1.54 million, consuming about 92 trillion Tokens per day.

It needs to be specially noted here that DeepSeek Harness is an independent AI Agent product, which is not the same as the well-known DeepSeek chat App.

The main DeepSeek App has a huge user base, and the 1.54 million daily active users disclosed this time refers to Harness users who use the official API, which cannot be simply understood as the independent daily active users of the desktop client.

It has been less than three months since the first version was released. For a product that has just entered the AI office market, this result is quite good.

So, what level does 1.54 million daily active users represent in the domestic AI office market?

02. What are the estimated daily active users of Tencent, Alibaba and Baidu?

QuestMobile previously released the AI application market report for the third quarter of 2026, which announced the monthly active user data of several mainstream AI office products.

As of September, Tencent WorkBuddy had 32.353 million monthly active users, Baidu Dazi had 9.77 million, Alibaba Qianwen Office had 7.905 million, and ByteDance Doubao Work had 2.049 million.

Tencent WorkBuddy has a very obvious leading position, followed by Baidu and Alibaba.

However, these figures are all monthly active users, while DeepSeek announced daily active users, so it is definitely unreasonable to compare them directly.

We might as well make a data deduction.

Assuming that the daily active user / monthly active user ratio of these AI office products is 15%, then WorkBuddy has about 4.85 million daily active users, Baidu Dazi about 1.47 million, Qianwen Office about 1.19 million, and Doubao Work about 310,000.

Here comes the interesting part.

According to this assumption, the 1.54 million daily active users of DeepSeek Harness has even exceeded the estimated values of Baidu Dazi, Qianwen Office and Doubao Work, firmly ranking second.

If we raise the daily active user / monthly active user ratio to 20%, the situation will be different.

WorkBuddy has about 6.47 million daily active users, Baidu Dazi about 1.95 million, Qianwen Office about 1.58 million, and Doubao Work about 410,000.

At this time, DeepSeek Harness will fall behind Qianwen Office, but the gap between the two is only about 40,000 daily active users.

Of course, the above is only a scenario prediction based on public monthly active user data. 15% and 20% are hypothetical values, not real statistical results. Moreover, the monthly active user data of competing products are from September, and the daily active user data of Harness are from November, and the statistical scopes are not completely consistent, so the real ranking cannot be determined for the time being.

But in terms of user scale, DeepSeek Harness already has the potential to challenge the leading products in the domestic AI office market.

Moreover, there is one point that deserves special attention.

03. DeepSeek still has a disadvantage: it costs money to use

After carefully studying the product mechanism of DeepSeek Harness, we can find that it currently has an obvious growth threshold.

Model calls usually require payment.

The Harness software itself is free and open source, but to use the official model, users need to top up through their DeepSeek Open Platform accounts. If users choose other models, they can also connect to third-party model APIs such as Qianwen, Kimi, and GLM by themselves, and the fees are calculated according to the rules of the corresponding service providers.

Of course, if users connect to third-party free models or have already purchased other model packages, they also have the opportunity to reduce usage costs.

But for ordinary users, configuring models and understanding Token billing itself increases the usage threshold.

Let's take a look at several other domestic AI office products.

Tencent WorkBuddy has provided free experience quota and points collection channels. Baidu Dazi has an activity of getting points by daily check-in. ByteDance Doubao Work has recently launched check-in benefits, and users can get 8800 quota after 30 days of consecutive check-in.

Alibaba Qianwen Office also provides free points and some member model rights.

The free policies of various companies are not completely the same, and some are even time-limited activities, but the direction is very clear: to minimize the cost for users to use AI office products for the first time.

DeepSeek Harness obviously still has room for improvement in this aspect.

An Agent that usually requires payment for model calls and whose product experience is not yet perfect has already accumulated 1.54 million daily active users. What will happen if DeepSeek starts to give out a large number of free quotas one day?

I think this question is worthy of serious consideration by Tencent, Alibaba, ByteDance and Baidu.

For example, DeepSeek Harness gives a certain number of Tokens for daily check-in, allowing ordinary users to complete several document, spreadsheet or PPT tasks for free.

For another example, connect some third-party free models by default, use free models to solve simple tasks, and then call more powerful paid models for complex tasks.

It can even launch a subscription package similar to Agent Plan, where users pay a fixed fee every month to enjoy Agent task calling services within a certain quota.

For ordinary users, fixed subscription is obviously more acceptable than estimating API costs every time.

At present, DeepSeek has not announced these plans, and the above several models are just conjectures about the future development direction of the product.

But from the perspective of product managers, these are all growth methods worth considering.

In particular, with 1.54 million daily active users already, if the usage threshold is further reduced and the office functions are continuously improved, Harness does have the opportunity to gain more ordinary users.

Of course, behind the free quota is the real money cost of models. The more complex the Agent task is, the more Tokens it usually consumes. Whether DeepSeek can afford the subsidies and how to convert free users into long-term paying users are also problems that need to be solved.

03. 35,000 plugins, DeepSeek starts to take the ecological route

In addition to user growth, DeepSeek Harness has another noteworthy advantage: the plugin ecosystem.

According to the latest official data, the number of third-party plugins on Harness has reached about 35,000, and about 60% of active users have created or installed at least one third-party plugin.

This data is very impressive, which shows that many users have begun to actively explore and expand the capabilities of Harness, and even make plugins by themselves.

DeepSeek adopts an architecture of "everything is a plugin", where developers can expand functions according to their own needs, and even replace some built-in capabilities through third-party plugins.

This time, DeepSeek also announced that it will build an official plugin market in the future, and support plugin developers through Token incentives, technical exchanges, work recommendations and other methods.

It is quite like the App Store in the AI era.

Now Tencent, Alibaba and ByteDance are all working hard to enrich the functions of their own AI office products, and at the same time compete for users' work entrances with the help of ecosystems such as WeChat, WeCom, DingTalk and Feishu.

DeepSeek does not have these mature office software and organizational collaboration systems, so it is really difficult to catch up with the big tech players.

But if more and more third-party developers are willing to make plugins for Harness, the business scenarios it can cover will become richer and richer.

Even in the future, when users need a certain function, they can just go to the plugin market, find it and install it.

Of course, 35,000 plugins do not mean 35,000 mature and easy-to-use products. The security, compatibility and quality control of plugins are all problems that DeepSeek must solve next.

04. DeepSeek establishes product department and starts to take product development seriously

There is another thing that I think cannot be ignored.

On October 16, DeepSeek integrated and established a product department, bringing teams including Harness, Web, App and Platform under unified management, which is led by Cui Tianyi.

This person in charge previously worked at Jane Street for nine years, and joined DeepSeek in March this year to take charge of Harness-related businesses.

For DeepSeek, this is an organizational adjustment worthy of attention.

In the past, when people mentioned DeepSeek, the first thing that came to mind was its large model capabilities. As for product experience, it never seemed to get as much attention as the model itself.

But no matter how powerful the model is, ordinary users will eventually use it through products.

Especially for AI Agent, which involves file operation, tool calling, task execution and workflow management, the importance of product experience will only become higher and higher.

Now DeepSeek has specially established a product department and brought Harness under unified management. In the future, there will definitely be more actions in function richness, interface interaction, model access and plugin ecosystem.

Images are from DeepSeek's official WeChat account

In this official announcement, DeepSeek even proposed that it hopes to build Harness into an operating system for the Agent era.

This goal is really ambitious.

If in the future users can install various Agent plugins just like installing Apps, and complete office work, programming, data analysis, design and even enterprise business processes through one single entrance, the imagination space of Harness will be far more than just an AI office software.

However, the ideal is plump, and the competition in reality is also very fierce.

Tencent has WeCom, Alibaba has DingTalk, and ByteDance has Feishu. These big tech players have no shortage of office entrances, nor do they lack capital and technical teams.

For DeepSeek to enter the daily work processes of ordinary users, it still needs to continuously improve product experience, so that users are willing to open it every day, not just for a trial.

But an AI Agent that was launched less than three months ago and usually requires payment for model calls has already achieved 1.54 million daily active users. This growth speed is enough to make other manufacturers feel the pressure.

If DeepSeek completes the product experience optimization and launches free quota or Agent Plan packages in the future, the competition in the domestic AI office market will probably become more intense.

As for whether DeepSeek Harness can