Alibaba Group Holding’s DingTalk on Tuesday launched an updated version of its workplace collaboration app with the addition of an artificial intelligence (AI) agent feature to help users streamline and customize their workflow.
The development comes amid a flurry of activity in the AI sector, as Chinese companies race to integrate ChatGPT-like services into their products and after a similar move by rival app ByteDance, Feishu. Alibaba owns the South China Morning Post.
The AI agent feature announced alongside DingTalk 7.5 at a corporate event in Hangzhou, capital of eastern Zhejiang province, is designed to respond to feedback gleaned from more than 700,000 enterprise customers, Ye said Jun, president of DingTalk, in a statement.
The new tool is expected to promote greater adoption of AI products in the industry, according to the company.
“As the flow of AI-generated content increasingly impacts productivity and (business) use cases, AI agents have emerged as the most suitable gateway for AI applications Ye said.
ByteDance brings AI to office tool Feishu, taking on Tencent and Alibaba
ByteDance brings AI to office tool Feishu, taking on Tencent and Alibaba
Ye added that DingTalk’s goal is to become an AI agent platform with low barriers to entry, with the market expected to see substantial growth over the next three years.
By the end of 2023, Dingtalk had more than 700 million users. It also has 25 million organizations, including businesses and educational institutions, using its platform, of which 120,000 are paying customers, Ye said.
Footwear and apparel giant Belle International has deployed a custom AI agent on its DingTalk platform to track package shipping issues, with plans to expand the agent’s use to more cases , including inventory allocation.
DingTalk’s addition of an AI agent feature, powered by the group’s Tongyi Qianwen Large Language Model (LLM), comes after ByteDance’s Feishu made a similar move last November.
LLMs are deep learning models, pre-trained on large amounts of data, that underpin chatbots such as OpenAI’s ChatGPT, which took the world by storm a year ago with its ability understand complex questions and respond with human-like text.
During the launch of Feishu 7, ByteDance introduced an AI bot called Feishu Intelligent Buddy, which can help users with daily tasks such as writing emails, writing spreadsheets, and summarizing long reports.
Feishu also announced a platform for its enterprise customers to create and customize AI robots based on business needs, it said at the time.
After a year of hype around AI chatbots, major Chinese tech companies, including Alibaba, ByteDance and Baidu, have rushed to create products competing with ChatGPT, with applications spanning the financial, legal, manufacturing, and retail sectors. retail and public.
