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ByteDance Restructures Its ToB Business: What New Roles Will Doubao, Feishu, and Volcano Play?

On July 30, an internal email from ByteDance announced the 'grand unification' of its B2B business.

ByteDance announced the integration of Feishu and Doubao's product teams to form a new Doubao product team, led by Zhao Qi, head of Doubao.

Meanwhile, Feishu’s GTM (go-to-market) team—covering marketing, sales, and customer service—will merge with the Volcano Engine team to create a new ToB GTM organization called the 'Creativity Service Platform,' led by Tan Dai, head of Volcano Engine.

Following the reorganization, Feishu’s existing products and services will remain unchanged, while Feishu and Doubao will deepen product collaboration in productivity scenarios. The newly established Creativity Service Platform division will consolidate ByteDance’s ToB business capabilities to better meet enterprise clients’ AI needs.

This marks the largest reorganization of ByteDance’s ToB operations since it adopted a business segment structure in 2021, involving comprehensive adjustments across product, sales, and marketing functions.

In fact, it’s no surprise that this restructuring centers around Feishu, as rumors had already circulated in the market about an imminent deep integration between Feishu and Doubao.

Moreover, as the AI market increasingly enters the agent era—where agents focus on 'getting things done'—the boundary between ToC and ToB is blurring. Major tech companies worldwide are integrating work, chat, and coding functionalities. Given ByteDance’s strengths in large models, office productivity tools, and algorithmic recommendation systems, it naturally seeks to proactively adapt.

For ByteDance, this integration carries deeper strategic significance.

In its early years, ByteDance built its success on consumer-facing (ToC) businesses and has historically lacked standout enterprise (ToB) offerings.

However, in recent years, Feishu capitalized on the surge in demand for workplace collaboration tools and successfully captured significant market share; Volcano Engine has also delivered strong results—by usage volume, it achieved the top market share in China’s public cloud MaaS (Model-as-a-Service) segment in 2025.

This latest adjustment in the AI era is likely a pivotal move for ByteDance to further strengthen synergies between its ToC and ToB operations.

1. ByteDance’s ToB business is ending its siloed approach.

In the past, Doubao, Volcano Engine, and Feishu each operated independently.

Doubao’s large language model has amassed a substantial user base. As of June this year, Doubao’s monthly active users (MAU) reached approximately 382 million, ranking first among AI-native applications, with daily token usage exceeding 180 trillion.

Volcano Engine holds a significant share in the public cloud MaaS market. At the Volcano Engine FORCE Innovation Conference in June this year, Liang Rubo clearly affirmed the strategic importance of Volcano Engine’s MaaS business, stating it is becoming a foundational pillar for ByteDance.

Feishu’s commercialization growth is also accelerating markedly. In Q2 2026, over 90% of Feishu’s new customers simultaneously purchased Feishu AI products. According to Caixin, Feishu’s revenue growth rate year-over-year exceeded 100% in Q2 2026.

However, the advent of the AI era has made collaboration among these three products both necessary and urgent.

Although Feishu offers rich workplace scenarios—such as documents, meetings, and knowledge bases—and access to enterprise data, it lacks native, deeply integrated AI agent capabilities. Doubao possesses powerful large-model capabilities but lacks direct channels to reach enterprise users or access enterprise data. Meanwhile, Feishu and Volcano Engine serve many overlapping enterprise clients yet maintain separate marketing, sales, and customer service teams.

ByteDance’s recent restructuring can be understood as dividing its ToB business along two main lines: one focused on product development and the other on commercialization.

These two lines are interconnected through the broader collaborative workspace scenario, forming a unified whole—precisely what ByteDance described as the goal of this organizational adjustment: 'enhancing product and service synergy among Doubao, Feishu, and Volcano Engine in enterprise productivity scenarios.'

This division offers greater clarity and better aligns with the demands of the AI era.

From a messaging perspective, during this restructuring, Doubao and Feishu have already achieved significant progress in product-level collaboration.

As early as the end of June, Doubao was reported to be testing social features, with Feishu serving as the test platform.

Reports at the time indicated that users could log into Feishu directly using their Doubao accounts, with profile pictures, nicknames, and personal information displayed synchronously on Feishu; conversely, Feishu accounts could also be used to log into Doubao Enterprise Edition, enabling synchronized transfer of Feishu user names, organizational structures, documents, chat messages, and related permission data to Doubao.

Although Doubao’s spokesperson at the time denied any plans for social features, they emphasized that Doubao and Feishu were 'exploring some collaborative efforts in enterprise workplace scenarios and would deepen cooperation going forward.'

In June this year, Doubao Professional Edition officially launched, and this new product may become a key element in the integration of Feishu and Doubao—having already incorporated certain Feishu capabilities at launch.

Now, ByteDance has formally merged the product teams of Feishu and Doubao. According to reports, future collaboration between Feishu and Doubao will focus more heavily on a new product—Doubao Enterprise Edition.

Multiple media outlets reported that ByteDance disclosed externally that Doubao Enterprise Edition, developed with deep involvement from Feishu, has already begun internal testing among select Feishu clients.

This product offers general-purpose AI productivity tools and is natively integrated into the Feishu ecosystem, allowing users to seamlessly access Feishu Docs, Sheets, Meetings, group chats, and other workplace functionalities without additional deployment. It also supports precise Q&A and intelligent content creation based on an enterprise’s proprietary knowledge base.

Additionally, Doubao Enterprise Edition includes comprehensive enterprise-grade data isolation, permission controls, and security auditing capabilities.

Image source: Feishu official website

In contrast, there has been little disclosure so far regarding the integration of Feishu’s GTM (go-to-market, sales, and customer service) team with the Volcano Engine team.

However, market observers anticipate that ByteDance may eventually establish a unified sales system to bundle MaaS (Model-as-a-Service) and SaaS offerings, thereby preventing internal competition and resource inefficiencies between Feishu and Volcano Engine.

Previously, Feishu and Volcano Engine each maintained separate sales teams: customers approached Feishu’s sales representatives for workplace collaboration needs and Volcano Engine’s team for large model API access and cloud services. If Doubao Enterprise Edition gains traction, ByteDance would need yet another sales team—an outcome that clearly isn’t optimal.Today’s creativity service platform addresses enterprises’ office productivity, AI, and cloud computing needs through a single, integrated team.

2. Market demands have evolved—and Feishu is evolving with them

In this round of restructuring, Feishu’s strategic positioning warrants discussion.

While maintaining its existing products and services, Feishu is simultaneously supporting Doubao in developing 'Douban Office' and enriching Volcano Engine’s service ecosystem.

In other words, Feishu has evolved into a capability that now serves as the bridge between product and commercialization within ByteDance’s ToB business.

Why Feishu?

For a long time, Feishu built its competitive edge on a highly efficient collaboration product suite. Core features such as messaging, documents, and multi-dimensional tables had already formed the foundation of its commercialization well before the AI era arrived.

According to Feishu's first publicly disclosed data in February 2023, its core business metric—Annual Recurring Revenue (ARR) for 2022—reached USD 100 million, a 2.7-fold increase from 2021.

Source: ByteDance official website

Perhaps precisely because these collaborative office features laid a solid foundation, Feishu navigated relatively smoothly through the critical AI transformation period for collaborative platforms between 2024 and 2026.

Its AI strategy can be summarized as 'native AI Agent integration' and 'deep fusion with business scenarios,' embedding large model capabilities directly into core office suites and workflows, thereby transforming AI from a mere 'content-generation tool' into a 'digital employee' capable of directly operating systems.

For example, it has successively launched products such as Feishu Aily (an intelligent assistant), smart meeting minutes, AI-powered documents and multi-dimensional tables, Feishu CLI (an AI agent operation tool), and CodeM (an AI development agent).

Entering 2025, Feishu secured more enterprise customers, achieving revenue exceeding RMB 3 billion despite having only 15% of DingTalk’s monthly active users. In Q2 2026, its revenue grew by over 100% year-over-year. The revenue gap with DingTalk (RMB 4 billion) has narrowed to its lowest historical level, sparking industry debate over whether monthly active users truly reflect revenue-generating capability.

Of course, the strong foundation Feishu built in the past is one reason it became central to this strategic shift; an even more critical factor is that the collaborative office landscape itself has evolved in the AI era.

In the past, enterprises had relatively simple requirements for collaborative office software—it just needed to support communication, collaboration, and management.

But now, the situation has changed: office work has become the primary scenario for AI adoption. According to the 'National Informatization Development Report (2025)' released by the Cyberspace Administration of China, a web-based survey it conducted found that 92.2% of respondents had used generative AI applications for intelligent office tasks.

Behind this statistic lies a common user behavior: after working in collaborative or office software, many users switch to AI applications to complete critical tasks before returning to their office tools to continue working.

At its core, this phenomenon reflects not only the growing importance of AI in office workflows but also underscores that office software continues to play an indispensable role in today’s workplace processes.

Moreover, enterprise demand for office software is shifting from fragmented, piecemeal procurement toward integrated, all-in-one solutions.

A key data point illustrates this trend: in Q2 2026, more than 90% of Lark’s new customers simultaneously purchased Lark’s AI products.

In other words, when customers buy Lark’s services, they are also purchasing AI capabilities—enterprise clients have evolved from buying office software alone to acquiring a comprehensive AI solution.

In effect, this solution has become a new form of digital infrastructure—one that integrates office software, AI, and cloud services.

Given this shift in enterprise demand, ByteDance’s recent strategic realignment appears well justified. Lark, once a standalone product, has now become a critical capability within this broader infrastructure.

3. Doubao’s New Mandate: Preserve Its Strength in Consumer Markets While Exploring B2B Strategies

For ByteDance, this realignment carries an even deeper strategic significance.

ByteDance has always been a company with strong consumer (ToC) DNA—exceling at scaling user bases, delivering superior product experiences, and rapid iteration.

In contrast, B2B operations place greater emphasis on service delivery, client relationship management, and customized responsiveness—a dimension where ByteDance’s B2B initiatives have often faced criticism for applying a ToC mindset to ToB challenges.

However, in the AI era, ByteDance's consumer-focused (ToC) mindset may not necessarily have a negative impact on its business-to-business (ToB) operations.

As previously mentioned, in a survey conducted by the Cyberspace Administration of China, 92.2% of respondents reported having used generative AI applications for smart office tasks.

This data also sends another signal: the emergence of AI is blurring the boundaries between ToC and ToB use cases.ToC and ToB businesses are traditionally aimed at different user groups, but under the influence of AI technologies, their usage in office scenarios often overlaps.

Previously, ByteDance’s integrated strategy across ToB and ToC has frequently drawn attention—for example, leveraging its massive market presence and brand strength built on consumer-facing products (such as Doubao and TikTok) to directly boost awareness and customer trust for its enterprise offerings (like Volcano Engine).

This latest restructuring represents ByteDance’s deeper organizational-level integration between its B2B and B2C operations.

This approach differs from how several other major Chinese internet companies have consolidated their office productivity products.

Tencent and Alibaba have both focused on securing entry points through AI-powered office agents or desktop interfaces.

Earlier, Tencent announced an internal reorganization, transferring the QClaw Product Center’s relevant business units and certain teams to Cloud Product Division Six, placing them under the same management structure as its AI office assistant, WorkBuddy.

Alibaba has integrated three agent-based products—QoderWork, Wukong, and MuleRun—into a unified suite called 'Qwen Office,' which is now overseen by DingTalk’s new CEO, Arthur Chen.

Kingsoft Office’s strategy is to embed AI agents into office productivity features. For example, it previously launched two AI agents: Lingxi Pro for individual users and WPS Comate for organizations, emphasizing broad compatibility with mainstream large language models and highlighting its advantage as a gateway to office applications.

Amid fierce competition as industry players ramp up investment in AI agents, another prevailing industry reality presents ByteDance with an opportunity: most users remain confused about how to use AI agent products.

Previously, a user statistic widely circulated in AI circles showed that, as of early 2026, 84% of the global population had never used any AI product; only 16% had used free chatbots; and a mere 0.04% of the total population had deeply engaged with professional AI agent tools such as coding assistants.

While the source of this data is difficult to verify, other industry figures indirectly confirm that AI agent products have yet to achieve widespread adoption.

For instance, a recent report by Analysys on desktop AI office agents did not measure user engagement using metrics like active users—typically used to assess user assets—but instead relied on monthly visit volume as a traffic metric. Even combined, the 17 leading desktop AI office agent products recorded only over 60 million visits in June this year.

Source: Doubao official WeChat account

ByteDance’s current approach of integrating Doubao with Lark may help it develop simpler, more user-friendly office products at a time when users are generally confused about AI agents, thereby capturing greater attention from enterprise customers.

From ByteDance’s perspective, Doubao is expected to serve as the foundational productivity platform for B2B clients, while Lark provides Doubao with critical office scenarios. In the future, Doubao will become an AI assistant embedded directly into workflows—a vision with significant potential and a new strategic choice by ByteDance in the emerging era of AI-powered office productivity.

In fact, this strategic direction isn’t unique to ByteDance but reflects a shared choice among multiple major tech companies in the AI office era. ByteDance’s advantage, however, lies in not needing to build from scratch; instead, it can reorganize existing businesses to achieve faster execution and greater scale.

(The lead image for this article is sourced from ByteDance’s official website.)

Original/Insight Connection, by Wenxue Dou, edited by Ziyе.

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