The leading trio in China’s enterprise software market – Tencent’s WeChat Work, Alibaba’s DingTalk and ByteDance’s Lark Suite – are vying for dominance in a sector increasingly influenced by generative AI. Alibaba’s DingTalk and ByteDance’s Lark Suite have quickly introduced AI-based generative features, while WeChat Work has been more measured in its pace of implementing AI upgrades.
Just a day before the GPT Store launch earlier this week, DingTalk revealed its latest version with the large-scale launch of an “AI Assistant”, backed by Alibaba’s large-scale model Tongyi Qianwen. DingTalk also announced the launch of the “AI Assistant Store” in April this year. Over the next three years, DingTalk aims to incubate 10 million AI super assistants on the DingTalk platform.
ByteDance’s Lark Suite enhanced its AI capabilities last November, with the launch of AI products such as ‘Lark Intelligent Partner’ that serve multiple business use cases including content creation, data analysis and personalization. However, unlike AI Assistant released by DingTalk, Lark Intelligent Partner is still in the testing phase.
In comparison, Tencent’s WeChat Work has yet to make any significant announcements regarding product upgrades with generative AI.
As early as April 2023, DingTalk took the lead in integrating Alibaba’s Tongyi Qianwen large-scale model. Users can easily activate the AI assistant via the “/” icon on the home page, enhancing intelligent assistance capabilities in group chats, documents, video conferencing and application development. This feature quickly entered user testing in May.
In August, the large-scale model applications on DingTalk were further transformed with 17 product lines and 55 use cases on the LLM-powered platform. The platform introduced digital employees, AI-generated business personnel assistants capable of writing job offers, posting recruitment advertisements, screening candidates, scheduling interviews, etc. . The “AI Teaching Assistant” could help teachers grade homework, and a catering assistant could place orders directly on Chinese food ordering app Ele.me.
At present, DingTalk’s AI assistant services cover almost all product lines of DingTalk. The upcoming AI Assistant Store, scheduled to launch in April, will further enhance DingTalk’s AI capabilities.
Lark Suite announced the launch of an interactive AI assistant “My AI” in April 2023, followed by a statement in November to help businesses become “AI Ready.” This included the introduction of “Lark Intelligent Partner”, powered by large-scale models such as Chinese AI companies including Baichuan Intelligence, MiniMax and Zhipu AI. Interestingly, the large-scale “Yunque” model developed by ByteDance was not explicitly mentioned.
Like DingTalk’s AI super assistant, Feishu’s Intelligent Partner is also enabled via natural language and helps users in content creation, summarization, data analysis, etc. It can refine key meeting points, summarize unread messages, analyze PDF, audio and video files, and even generate management systems and sales solutions for specific scenarios.
Tencent’s large-scale Hunyuan model is the latest among China’s major Internet giants. Officially launched last September and updated in October, it introduced the “text to image” feature.
At that time, Tencent mentioned that more than 180 Tencent internal businesses had integrated with Hunyuan, including Tencent Meeting, Tencent Docs, WeCom, Tencent Ads and WeChat Search. WeChat Work uses the Hunyuan model with features such as automatically composing emails for users.
Overall, WeChat Work appears to have maintained a lower profile than DingTalk and Lark Suite, aligning with Tencent’s generally more reserved approach.
The current market landscape shows that DingTalk and WeChat Work are still in the lead, while Lark Suite has yet to shake the position of the two pioneers in the market. According to data published by Caixin, the popularity of Lark Suite remains far behind that of its two competitors. But it seems users are staying longer on Lark Suites.
As generative AI revolutionizes China’s enterprise software industry, competitive dynamics are poised to see significant changes in the coming years.
