Produced by Leida Finance | Written by Ding Yu | Edited by Meng Shuai

Under the 'relentless pressure' from competitors, ByteDance is accelerating reforms towards AI business architecture adjustments.

In this adjustment, ByteDance splits Lark, its 'beloved child' that just turned ten this year, into two. The Lark product team will be integrated with the Doubao product team, while the Lark GTM team will merge with the Volcano Engine team.

It is reported that this is the largest adjustment to ByteDance's To B business since implementing business segmentation in 2021.

ByteDance emphasizes that after the integration, Lark's existing products and services will remain unchanged, with both sides focusing on deepening product integration in office productivity scenarios.

According to Caijing, Lark's ARR (annualized revenue) exceeded 3 billion yuan in 2025, with a year-on-year increase of over 100% in ARR in the second quarter of 2026. However, considering expenses such as computing power and marketing, Lark still faces a profitability gap.

With ByteDance entering the 'fierce competition,' within less than ten days, Tencent, Alibaba, and ByteDance, the three internet giants, have successively completed or are rumored to have completed organizational restructuring of their AI office product lines.

It is worth mentioning that in the '2026 Global Unicorn List' released by Hurun Research Institute in June this year, ByteDance's valuation reached as high as 3.26 trillion yuan, ranking third globally and first domestically.

ByteDance 'splits' Lark: Half for Doubao, half for Volcano Engine

On July 30th, multiple media outlets reported that ByteDance issued an internal email announcing a major organizational restructuring targeting its AI business.

In this adjustment, Lark will be split into two and integrated into the Doubao product team and the Volcano Engine team, respectively. ByteDance stated that this is to strengthen product and service synergy among Doubao, Lark, and Volcano Engine in enterprise productivity scenarios.

Specifically, on the product side, the Lark product team will be integrated with the Doubao product team to form a new Doubao product team, led by Doubao's head Zhao Qi, with Lark's head Xie Xin reporting to Zhao Qi.

ByteDance stated that after the integration, Lark's existing products and services will remain unchanged, with both sides focusing on deepening product integration in office productivity scenarios.

It is reported that the Doubao Enterprise Edition, deeply developed with the participation of the Lark product team, has already started internal testing among some Lark customers.

Currently, the Doubao Enterprise Edition natively integrates Lark's office scenarios such as documents, spreadsheets, meetings, and group chats, supporting Q&A and creation functions based on the enterprise's own knowledge base, while equipped with enterprise-level security capabilities such as data isolation, permission control, and security auditing.

In terms of the commercialization system, the original Lark GTM (Marketing, Sales, Customer Service) team will be integrated with the corresponding team from Volcano Engine to form a To B GTM organization named the 'Creativity Service Platform.'

This organization will be responsible for the marketing, sales, and customer service of ByteDance's cloud services such as MaaS and SaaS, led by Volcano Engine's head Tan Dai, with Lark's sales head Lin Chan and Lark's strategy and marketing head Shi Zhijun reporting to Tan Dai.

Some believe that this organizational integration indicates that ByteDance is further elevating the priority of its AI to B strategy.

According to Beijing Business Today, in the second quarter of 2026, over 90% of Lark's new customers simultaneously purchased Lark's AI products. Based on the average consumption in July, ByteDance's large model business ARR reached 4 billion US dollars, exceeding the combined ARR of other domestic model companies.

According to data previously disclosed by Volcano Engine, as of June 2026, the daily average Token calls for the Doubao large model have exceeded 180 trillion, growing more than tenfold in the past year.

Another report from QuestMobile shows that Doubao's monthly active users reached 382 million in June, surpassing the combined total of the second-ranked Tongyi Qianwen and third-ranked DeepSeek.

In the ranking of China's public cloud MaaS service market released by IDC, Volcano Engine also ranked first with a 49.5% market share.

With the support of the largest 'C-end AI user base + public cloud MaaS service computing power platform' in China, Lark's office scenarios and customer resources are being more deeply integrated into ByteDance's AI system.

A Decade of Layout: From 'Self-Use' to Full Embrace of AI

Tianyancha shows that Beijing Lark Technology Co., Ltd. was registered and established in 2016 as a member company of the Douyin Group. The inspiration for the name Lark comes from 'flying pigeon transmission.'

Xie Xin, the head of Lark, once stated that at the end of 2016, after trying various tools on the market, ByteDance decided to start in-house development, aiming to build a globally leading collaboration suite starting from communication and creation tools.

Lark was born under this background, integrating functions such as instant communication, shared calendars, online documents, audio and video conferences, and cloud drives.

The core driving force behind ByteDance's in-house development of Lark was to create a tool that could ensure collaboration among tens of thousands of employees worldwide.

According to public information, ByteDance began using Lark internally in late 2017 and started domestic beta testing and promotion in 2018.

After the outbreak of remote work demand due to the pandemic, ByteDance announced in early 2020 that it would provide all small and medium-sized enterprises and anti-epidemic organizations with free access to the commercial version of Lark for three years. Since then, ByteDance has further increased its investment in Lark.

In November 2021, ByteDance CEO Liang Rubo issued an internal letter announcing an organizational restructuring. At that time, Lark, EE, and EA were merged into the Lark business segment, becoming one of the company's six major business segments.

It is reported that this segment focuses on providing enterprise collaboration and management services, integrating office collaboration applications such as instant communication, online documents, calendars, audio and video conferences, and providing organizational operation and management products such as OKR, recruitment, performance, and contracts.

Now, years later, with the rise of AI, Lark is once again undergoing significant organizational changes.

According to media reports, Doubao and Lark have already established a Doubao Office department internally, aiming to promote Doubao's deep integration into real office and collaboration processes.

Leida Finance noticed that on ByteDance's official website, job postings related to 'Doubao Office' can also be seen.

These job positions include AI Strategy Product Manager and Agent Technology R&D Engineer for Doubao Office, mainly responsible for product functions, cross-product capability integration, and large-scale implementation of Doubao in intelligent office and enterprise scenarios, as well as Agent technology R&D for Doubao Office and productivity directions.

According to Beijing Business Today, the collaboration between Lark and Doubao has already taken a step forward on the product side. When visiting the Lark official website, a pop-up window saying 'Doubao is now in Lark!' will appear.

According to the pop-up content, 'Get Doubao Professional + Lark Pilot for as low as 99 yuan/month,' saving at least 89 yuan/month compared to purchasing Doubao Professional (starting from 68 yuan/seat/month) and Lark Pilot (starting from 120 yuan/seat/month) separately.

It is introduced that this product integrates an enterprise AI assistant, providing intelligent Q&A, meeting minutes, automatic replies, group chat summaries, and automatic scheduled tasks, while equipped with Seed 2.1 Pro, Seedance 2.0 models, and the Lark office suite, including 15TB of storage space, 50,000 rows of multi-dimensional table rows, and 500,000 automation times per month.

Combined with ByteDance's overall organizational adjustments, this pop-up window is not a temporary promotion but a direct reflection of the organizational adjustments on the product side.

Tencent and Alibaba Successively Apply 'Pressure,' Internet Giants Converge Their Battle Lines

In fact, with the rapid development of AI technology, the industry has gradually formed a consensus: The emergence of emerging technologies such as AI large models and AI agents is forcing internet giants to break down the previously clear product boundaries between office and AI departments.

When agent capabilities surpass the productivity threshold, enterprise customers' focus is no longer on whether the model can generate content but on whether AI can read enterprise knowledge, understand organizational permissions, invoke business tools, and complete real work in a closed loop.

Alibaba was one of the early pioneers, proposing the 'Cloud + DingTalk Integration' in 2020, attempting to combine DingTalk's personnel, organizational, and application entry points with Alibaba Cloud's computing and digital infrastructure.

However, limited by the technological maturity at the time, this layout mostly remained at the level of mutual drainage (translated as 'user guidance') between cloud and collaboration office software, failing to form an irreplaceable deep product binding.

Some believe that Tencent may be the first domestic vendor to successfully implement the 'AI + Office' landing path. After the explosive popularity of OpenClaw earlier this year, Tencent quickly followed up, launching a 'Lobster Family Bucket' that included self-developed Lobster, Local Lobster, Cloud Lobster, Enterprise Lobster, Cloud Desktop Lobster, and more.

Among them, WorkBuddy, focusing on AI full-scenario office, relies on scenario demands and ecological traffic, leading in user scale and demonstrating strong market explosive power (translated as 'explosive growth') and expansion potential.

QuestMobile data shows that in June this year, WorkBuddy's total user usage reached 74.33 million times, with a 167.2% increase from April to June, significantly leading Tencent's own Qclaw and similar products from competitors such as Alibaba and Zhipu.

Recently, Tencent and Alibaba have tacitly accelerated their AI office business layout (translated as 'deployment') simultaneously, concentrating their forces and converging their battle lines.

On July 20th, Tencent issued an internal organizational adjustment notice, transferring relevant businesses and some teams from its QClaw product center to Cloud Product Division VI, integrating them with WorkBuddy under the same management system to achieve deep collaboration.

The next day, there was news that Alibaba would integrate three Agent products, QoderWork, Wukong, and MuleRun, into 'Qianwen Office,' led by DingTalk's new CEO Chen Yusen.

Now, just 10 days later, ByteDance has also joined this silent competition by integrating Lark into Doubao and Volcano Engine.

With the strong support of Doubao and Volcano Engine, can Lark make a late comeback? Leida Finance will continue to follow.