The Great Voyage Era of AI: Feishu and DingTalk Await Their Columbus
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The emergence of Sora has sent tremors of excitement through the global internet, leaving over 200 large language models in China treading on thin ice. The generational gap between Chinese and American internet technologies has widened further, presenting formidable challenges ahead.
In the enterprise services sector, Salesforce, the world's largest SaaS giant, has launched AI products Einstein Copilot and AI Cloud, pulling itself out of the mire. Its market value has surged from $138 billion a year ago to $300 billion today.
The popularity of generative AI has also transformed China's online office landscape. In April 2023, DingTalk introduced its Intelligent Assistant, with CEO Bu Qiong boldly claiming that 10 million intelligent assistants would emerge on DingTalk within a year. In November, Feishu launched its generative AI product Feishu Intelligent Partner. CEO Xie Xin described it as capable of writing like a human, essentially adding another colleague to the team. When the entire industry is lamenting why China's To B sector has not seen growth in 20 years and remains trapped in the curse of unprofitability, AI is opening up new frontiers for enterprise services.
A senior figure analyzed China's To B market in a social media post: "China's wealthiest corporate groups are not sensitive to efficiency improvements. Meanwhile, the vast majority of small and micro-enterprises care deeply about pricing."
This statement highlights the challenges of enterprise services in China. On the demand side, the wealthiest corporate groups—such as state-owned enterprises and real estate companies—do not rely on efficiency for profits, nor are they accountable for it. Small and micro-enterprises, however, need to see tangible returns from To B services. The payment habits of small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) in the B2B sector are far from established. In China, the biggest competitor for SaaS companies is not your peers, but the bosses who believe everything can be solved with Excel and those who expect everything to be free. Even after 20 years, the primary source of Office installations remains pre-installation by manufacturers, and 95% of internet users have never paid to install the Office suite themselves.
Helping enterprise services prove the value of their tools has become a mandatory course. Even powerful platforms like Feishu, with their renowned Chief Commercial Officer Lin Chan, need to calculate the value proposition for large enterprises. Meanwhile, Youzan, the largest listed SaaS company in China, has to venture into the traffic business, providing one-stop services from tools to traffic for small and micro clients.
The inherently competitive environment in the Chinese market makes profitability in enterprise services even more challenging. Price competition has become an industry consensus, and even without it, making a profit in enterprise services is like 'picking up pennies'—a tough and thankless job. The release of ChatGPT has transformed the industry, with hundreds of large models reflecting tech companies' dreams of empowering B2B services. AI is now being integrated into enterprise operations. DingTalk launched its AI-powered DingTalk Super Assistant, Feishu introduced the Smart Partner, Tencent rolled out Qidian, Youzan provided each merchant with the "Jiawo AI" assistant, Weimeng unveiled Weimeng WAI, Beisen introduced the Personal Leadership Coach, and Xirenxinshi launched AI XiaoXin. These AI products, while wrapped in the guise of serving end-users, are fundamentally designed for enterprise users because enterprise services are closest to revenue.
AI's value in enterprise services lies in its ability to break through the growth ceiling. Previously, double-digit growth was considered the pinnacle for China's enterprise services. With AI integrated into business operations, achieving three to five times annual growth has become much easier. This is because the immediate impact of AI on enterprise products drives companies' willingness to pay. Enterprise services vary widely across industries, with many being monthly or yearly active products, while others require extensive manuals just to locate their entry points. Each business needs its own service portal for To B operations—one capable of integrating both internal and external products while offering convenient service invocation capabilities. In the era of AI proliferation, collaborative office software has emerged as the sole viable option for To B portals. These platforms excel in long-duration, high-frequency usage scenarios and serve as communication channels connecting enterprises internally and externally. The only missing piece was deep integration with internal data and systems—a barrier now dismantled by AI.
When generative AI combines with big models and big data, it demonstrates remarkable effects. While trillion-parameter general-purpose models are impressive, the billion-parameter vertical industry models derived from their combination with specific sectors prove even more efficient. By further integrating these vertical models with internal enterprise data, they evolve into intelligent assistants capable of corporate predictions. For businesses, the more internal data fed to AI, the more powerful it becomes—expanding its capabilities and widening competitive gaps. In this context, AI transforms into a conduit for internal data connectivity. Powerful AI tools naturally merge with high-frequency platforms like Feishu and DingTalk, becoming indispensable employee products. When Feishu and DingTalk integrate with AI, when they become the entry point for enterprise services, when they evolve into connection platforms like Salesforce, and when they provide more customer acquisition and repurchase capabilities for service provider ecosystems, the spring of enterprise services truly arrives. Only with a forest can there be giant trees.
AI becomes smarter by connecting internal and external data, and efficiency improves when employees use it more frequently. By connecting with industry data, AI can be opened to users and enterprises, extending the boundaries of enterprise services from businesses to individuals. Enterprise services can be used by individuals, who in turn can drive their affiliated companies to become customers of AI-providing enterprises. Pan Yang, Chief Operating Partner and COO of Zhide Law Firm, shared on DingTalk Feishu about the legal AI assistant—Xiao Zhi. Xiao Zhi provides accurate and time-saving services for lawyers by answering questions based on different professional knowledge and cases. It quickly masters the vast knowledge across various professional fields at Zhide Law Firm, helping employees get up to speed faster and enabling clients to obtain quick answers to basic questions. Feishu and DingTalk have begun their strategic layouts. In January of this year, DingTalk launched the DingTalk AI Assistant, which is divided into enterprise AI assistants and personal AI assistants. Each user can create a personalized AI assistant with a single click on the AI assistant page, and enterprises can fully utilize their accumulated knowledge bases and business data to conduct data analysis and insights through conversations after obtaining authorization. DingTalk's president, Ye Jun, announced that DingTalk will launch the AI Super Assistant Market (AI Agent Store) in April 2024 and plans to create 10 million AI super assistants within three years.
In November 2023, Feishu released the 'Feishu Intelligent Partner,' which not only helps users extract key points from meetings, summarize unread messages, and analyze PDFs and audio-video materials but also automatically continues or generates documents, tables, emails, mind maps, questionnaires, and more during the creation process. Feishu's 'Feishu Intelligent Partner' has opened an AI service framework, allowing enterprises to independently select the underlying large models suitable for specific business scenarios.
Looking at the development of ChatGPT, we can see the trend. After OpenAI officially announced the launch of the GPT Store and ChatGPT Team services, within just two months, there have been over 3 million custom GPT applications. According to data released by OpenAI, 92% of Fortune Global 500 companies are using OpenAI's products to build services. The future of AI is the future of Feishu and DingTalk, and the future of enterprise services.
AI is disrupting industries. The greatest value of AI lies not only in making efficiency perceptible and measurable but also in deeply integrating AI into enterprises, transforming it into an intelligent brain that understands businesses better. This enables AI to provide summaries, predictions, and decision-making capabilities for enterprises, with decisions grounded in a thorough understanding of enterprise data. The efficiency revolution has thus evolved from a slogan into a tangible and measurable experience.
The world's largest SaaS platform, Salesforce, has adopted an "All in AI" strategy. In June 2023, Salesforce launched its first AI-based CRM software—AI Cloud—laying the foundation for large-scale model applications in To B platform enterprises. AI Cloud supports the deployment of multiple large models, integrating AI with enterprise data and feeding it to large models for output. AI Cloud offers four types of models to meet enterprise demands for large models, including: Salesforce's private AI model, OpenAI model, Vertex AI model, and bring-your-own model. This not only allows vertical large models to serve industries through the Salesforce platform but also provides enterprises with a pathway for deep private customization. Salesforce's service platform for vendors and enterprises once again serves as a bridge. When the dawn of AI is on the horizon, the new frontier of Chinese enterprise services awaits its Columbus, with boundless gold, land, and opportunities ready to unveil their mysteries.
Service providers are the Columbuses of enterprise services. The value of enterprise services needs to be discovered, amplified, and ignited by these providers. No great achievement can be meticulously planned—just as the New World was discovered not by the Spanish monarchy but by the Italian explorer Columbus, sponsored by them.
The same applies to Feishu and DingTalk. The self-developed capabilities of these platforms are unique and non-replicable, unable to deliver linear business growth for the ecosystem. Only when service providers cultivate new AI-powered capabilities on these platforms—capabilities that drive business growth and can be replicated by others—can true transformation occur. AI alone can transcend singular product functionalities, bringing efficiency gains to service providers across industries. Feishu and DingTalk possess customers, viral potential, and users, offering service providers a platform for business growth, client operations, and sustained repurchases. The service providers missing in Feishu and DingTalk are Wuyou Media in Douyin with its influencers like Dalanggou Couple and Sister Maomao, Youzan in WeChat which integrated mini-programs and attracted Ten O'Clock Reading, and Shouqianba in Alipay which invented the aggregated payment QR code...
How can service providers on Feishu and DingTalk transform their products with AI? How to improve efficiency with AI is a question Feishu and DingTalk must consider, and a problem they must solve in the AI era. Whoever can help service providers make money and leverage AI to create greater industry influence will stand firm in the AI era. In the AI era, it's not service providers relying on Feishu and DingTalk, but rather Feishu and DingTalk relying on service providers to solidify their foundation.
AI is the driving force for future growth. Bai Ya, CEO of Youzan, said: 'In the next 5-10 years, the best SaaS companies will be those that most successfully integrate with AI.' For Feishu and DingTalk, service providers are the key to winning the future, the key to reaching a hundred-billion-dollar market value, and the spring breeze heralding the arrival of spring for China's enterprise services.