Five AI Office Contenders Race: After Entrance Integration, Renewals and Delivery Capabilities Become Key

In 2026, the domestic AI office sector is set for a structural turning point. Multiple product lines that had once been run in parallel as internal experiments within the major internet companies completed consolidation one after another within less than two months, the years-long "internal horse race" mechanism was halted, and computing power, traffic, and team resources accelerated their concentration around AI office entry points. Add to that Kingsoft Office, which had already written AI into its financial reports, and this track is now crowded with five heavyweight players, including Baidu, Alibaba, Tencent, and ByteDance.

Market data also confirms the explosive pace of the sector. IDC forecasts that the market size of enterprise-level AI agents in China will grow from 21.2 billion yuan in 2025 to 332 billion yuan in 2029. China Securities Co., Ltd. estimates that the global potential market for AI office is between 300 billion and 1.56 trillion US dollars, with potential users expanding from tens of millions of programmers to 1 billion general white-collar workers. Behind these numbers lies a comprehensive contest of capital, models, ecosystems, and organizational capabilities.

As AI moves from "being able to answer" to "being able to get things done," a hundred-billion-level battle over the "next-generation productivity entry point" is moving from technical groundwork into a head-to-head race. Whoever can turn an assistant into a workbench and a tool into an operating system will hold the "ticket" to the core processes of enterprises. No giant is willing to be absent.

Consolidating and Laying Cards on the Table

On October 31, Alibaba and Apple reached a partnership to integrate Qwen into Apple Intelligence, allowing Chinese users to directly invoke Qwen's text and image understanding, content generation, and other capabilities in Siri, writing tools, and visual intelligence. These features will open for testing with the latest iOS developer Beta starting November 4 and will be rolled out to Chinese users when iOS 27.3 is officially released in December.

Some market analysts believe that Qwen is expected to become the first domestic large model to land in Apple's China ecosystem, pushing light office capabilities such as writing, polishing, and summarization down to the native system level. At the same time, in the competition where "the model is the entry point," relying on Apple's terminal distribution channels, Alibaba is expected to make up for its shortcomings in consumer reach. However, this partnership is not exclusive, and there remains the possibility of introducing other large models into the Apple ecosystem later, so the competitive landscape of the sector still has variables.

On the card table that has already been laid out, the five players' entry methods, resource endowments, and strategic paths are completely different, but their timelines are highly concentrated.

On July 20, Tencent merged QClaw into WorkBuddy. On July 30, ByteDance issued an internal letter integrating Feishu and Doubao; on August 24, ByteDance consolidated the TRAE and Coze product lines. On August 3, Alibaba's Qwen Office opened public beta, fully integrated from three products: QoderWork, MuleRun, and Wukong. Baidu, meanwhile, merged dodo into Baidu Dazi on August 6.

Tencent was the first player to launch integration and places the strongest emphasis on the desktop entry point. Public information shows that WorkBuddy opened for internal experience within Tencent in January 2026; on February 6 it opened internal testing, positioned as a desktop workbench for workplace AI agents; and in March it officially launched across all scenarios, fully compatible with OpenClaw skills and supporting remote control via WeCom, QQ, Feishu, DingTalk, and others.

According to media reports, WorkBuddy was described internally as "Tencent's third strategic-level product after QQ and WeChat," with Tencent founder Pony Ma personally participating in product meetings, and most project requirements being approved quickly. Tencent's first-quarter 2026 report stated that, by daily active accounts, WorkBuddy is currently the most widely used productivity AI agent service in China.

On September 2, the WorkBuddy open platform officially launched, bringing in more than 100 ecosystem partners in the first batch. It supports free switching among five major models—Hunyuan, DeepSeek, GLM, Kimi, and MiniMax—and its path is "individual first," that is, first making a desktop assistant for everyone and then penetrating enterprises from the bottom up, following the "open ecosystem" route that Tencent has consistently adhered to.

Alibaba, by contrast, is betting its core chips on the enterprise-level track. Qwen Office relies on the million-level enterprise customers and organizational management data accumulated by DingTalk, and is officially positioned as the industry's first product to simultaneously cover three types of agents: desktop, cloud, and enterprise collaboration.

The organizational skill library launched by Qwen Office on August 12 allows employees to encapsulate work methods as Skills and share them within the organization after review; on August 18 it officially connected to WeCom, after having already connected to DingTalk and Feishu, thus supporting all three major mainstream collaborative office platforms in China.

On September 4, Qwen Office announced that its user count exceeded 30 million in its first month, more than half of whom are enterprise users. By comparison, Microsoft disclosed in its financial report at the end of July that paid seats for Microsoft 365 Copilot had exceeded 30 million, relying on a base of more than 400 million commercial users of M365 and taking nearly two years.

ByteDance's integration was the most aggressive. On July 30, ByteDance issued an internal letter merging the Feishu product team and the Doubao product team to establish a new Doubao product team, uniformly managed by Doubao head Zhao Qi. This was an important organizational adjustment for ByteDance's B-end business since it established six major business units in 2021.

On August 24, the TRAE and Coze teams were wholly merged into Doubao; on August 25, the "Doubao Work" brand was officially released, deeply connected with Feishu. In less than a month, all of ByteDance's AI products for productivity scenarios were gathered under Doubao.

Doubao Work integrates Doubao's natural interaction capabilities and multimodal generation advantages accumulated on the consumer side with Feishu's B-end organizational collaboration, document retention, and permission systems. It has listed more than 200 skills and connectors and has densely updated features such as remote computer control, Windows virtual desktop, and cloud computers. On September 2, Doubao Work launched a multi-Agent parallel feature and a computer operation feature under the Mac system; on October 28, it upgraded the computer operation capability again.

Baidu took a dual-track path of "internal integration + vertical new brands." Baidu Dazi fully launched on March 22, and on August 27 completed a package of upgrades covering the personal edition, enterprise edition, professional suite, and workbench. As of October 26, Baidu Dazi's user scale had grown 9 times quarter-on-quarter, enterprise customers had grown 83%, demand for deliverables had surged 4.3 times, and month-on-month MAU growth reached 1063.79%, firmly ranking first on the growth chart.

On August 14, Baidu Wenku Wangpan's general-purpose agent GenFlow, running in parallel with Baidu Dazi, officially announced its Chinese name "Kuku AI," launching a full set of independent office products including a PC client, web version, mini program, and enterprise edition. Kuku AI focuses on cross-device, cross-time end-cloud task relay; even if the computer is shut down, tasks can continue to be processed in the mini program. It also initially provides special optimization for financial scenarios, with built-in databases of global listed company quotes, financial reports, and research reports, and connects Baidu Wangpan and Wenku's 1.8 billion professional documents.

Another move by Baidu was to bring Agents into the home. On September 8, Baidu announced that Baidu Dazi would fully connect to Xiaodu hardware, with Baidu agents entering home spaces, and simultaneously launched four new products: Tiantian Guimi Ji Ultra, Smart Screen X9 Ultra, Smart Camera C1500, and Smart Speaker Pro Max. Xiaodu has entered more than 55 million households nationwide, providing Baidu Dazi with a ready-made entry point for home scenarios. Baidu Dazi thus moved from "workflow" into "life flow," and the battle for entry points is spreading from a desktop to a speaker and a screen.

Unlike the logic of internet giants "building entry points from 0 to 1," Kingsoft Office chose to grow AI capabilities on the foundation of existing office software. In the first half of 2026, it explicitly proposed a strategy of transitioning from "Office AI" to "AI Office."

In mid-July, Kingsoft Office released two AI office agents in succession: "Lingxi Professional Edition" for individuals and "WPS Comate" for organizations. The former is positioned as a professional personal office assistant, and the latter as an organization-level AI office entry point.

Its 2026 third-quarter report shows that Kingsoft Office achieved operating revenue of 5.08 billion yuan in the first three quarters, a year-on-year increase of 21.57%; net profit attributable to parent company was 2.637 billion yuan, a year-on-year increase of 123.77%. In the third quarter, WPS personal subscriptions achieved revenue of 1.05 billion yuan, a year-on-year increase of 16.78%; WPS 365 achieved revenue of 270 million yuan, a year-on-year increase of 33.83%. As of September 30, WPS Office had 678 million global monthly active devices.

The competitive dimension is shifting

Behind the dense launches of products is a more fundamental change: the core of competition in office Agents is shifting from basic generation capabilities to task implementation and result delivery capabilities.

In a research report, CITIC Securities pointed out that office Agents are evolving from content generation tools to complex task execution platforms, and the core of industry competition has shifted from basic generation capabilities to task implementation and result delivery capabilities.

Currently, competition in the AI office field is at a stage where basic capabilities are converging and differentiation has not yet opened up. As the general capabilities of mainstream large models continue to converge, the gaps among companies in basic functions such as content generation and information Q&A are narrowing, and overall homogenization is relatively high.

At the same time, market analysis also points out that most products have not yet deeply embedded into real workflows or established solid user stickiness. This also means that what is being contested now is no longer "whether it can write," but "whether it can get things done for you."

Evaluation data confirms this. In May, Baidu Dazi topped the agent evaluation benchmark PinchBench, occupying 3 of the top 5 spots. PinchBench covers 147 tasks across 23 real work scenarios and evaluates Agents' multi-step reasoning, tool calling, and task closed-loop capabilities. Two versions of Baidu Dazi took the top two spots with 93.3% and 93.2%, while Anthropic and OpenAI native frameworks scored 89% and 91.6% respectively in the same scenarios.

In July, according to AI Product List · Desktop List (PC) data, WorkBuddy and Baidu Dazi ranked first and second on the overall AI office agent list with 11.1523 million and 6.743 million MAU respectively; ByteDance's TraeWork ranked third on the overall list with 2.6599 million MAU; Coze ranked fourth on the overall list with 2.1733 million MAU.

In August, in the "AI Office Agent Ranking" released by AIGCRank, Tencent WorkBuddy led with 92.05 points, followed by Doubao Work (82.16 points) and Coze (80.58 points), while Kuku AI, less than a month after launch, broke into the top four with 78.62 points, even surpassing Qianwen Office and Baidu Dazi.

On October 20, QuestMobile released its third-quarter AI application market report. In September, the AI office track's total active users reached 142 million, up 50.6% year on year. The top three on the typical office Agent list were Tencent WorkBuddy, Baidu Dazi and Alibaba Qianwen Office, with 32.353 million, 9.77 million and 7.905 million active users respectively.

The frequent changes at the top of the evaluation rankings precisely show that the new front line of "delivery capability" is far from decided.

Cost control for long-horizon tasks is another dividing line. On June 15, Baidu Dazi completed a core engine upgrade, using its self-developed Harness engine and multiple engineering optimizations to reduce Token consumption during long-horizon task execution by 75%, the first time among domestic general-purpose agent products that such a large reduction in consumption was achieved through engine optimization.

On August 26, Alibaba released the Qwen3.8-Flash model, and Qianwen Office, together with the model team, launched a dedicated version. Official data show that in real office scenario tests, single-task generation speed increased by about 100%, and Token consumption fell by an average of 75%. Lower costs are the precondition for large-scale user adoption of AI office tools.

Users can complete the entire office workflow with a single phone, handle tasks in a mini program even when the computer is off, and remotely operate multiple computers in parallel. For products that want to put Agents into real workflows, cost and connectivity are closer to the essence of "whether it can be used" than parameter scale.

At the Baidu Dazi product launch event on August 27, Baidu proposed a new AI office standard of "delivery is stunning." Shen Dou, executive vice president of Baidu Group and president of Baidu Intelligent Cloud Business Group, explained the concept, arguing that the yardstick for evaluating AI office tools should shift from simple generation speed to comprehensive delivery quality of results.

Qianwen Office, by contrast, makes "context" the key answer to practicality. On August 17, Qianwen Office open-sourced the context infrastructure MyContext, a technology that can transform massive heterogeneous work data into context that Agents can directly call. Within weeks of open-sourcing, it gained more than 3,000 Stars on GitHub. Combined with deep integration with IM software such as DingTalk, Qianwen Office can transform information scattered across enterprise business processes such as messages, documents, approvals, emails and knowledge bases into organizational context that Agents can understand and call.

In a deployment case at Changan Automobile, electrical engineers used Qianwen Office to develop a wire harness selection calculation tool, compressing what originally took about two days of item-by-item verification to about 5 minutes; a 55-year-old logistics packaging administrator broke down a review process involving hundreds of suppliers into automated scripts, reducing the workload by more than 90%.

Kingsoft Office's Lingxi Professional Edition can directly generate documents that are editable, reviewable, traceable and collaborative, achieving a complete closed loop from requirement understanding to result delivery.

At the same time, Kingsoft Office's enterprise-oriented WPS Comate builds a four-layer trust mechanism through TrustHub, covering identity permissions, data classification, device authentication and agent behavior control, addressing enterprises' core concerns about data security. It has been deployed in 11 major fields and 26 typical expert scenarios, serving hundreds of medium and large enterprises.

Commercialization and moats

Currently, AI office products have formed a composite structure of "personal subscription + enterprise seats + usage-based billing." For example, Alibaba Qianwen Office's personal standard edition costs 98 yuan/month, and the enterprise standard edition 198 yuan/person/month; ByteDance Doubao Professional Edition offers three monthly tiers of 68 yuan, 200 yuan and 500 yuan; Tencent WorkBuddy's standard edition costs 99 yuan/month, advanced edition 199 yuan/month, and flagship edition 999 yuan/month; Baidu Dazi's personal Pro edition costs 59 yuan/month and Max edition 129 yuan/month.

More noteworthy is the underlying change: the charging logic is shifting from "per-person billing" to "per-task/usage billing." Kingsoft Office stated clearly in its 2026 semi-annual report that personal AI products are exploring a hybrid model of "subscription + AI usage," while on the enterprise side WPS 365 is implementing "seats + AI usage," with tiered charges based on task complexity and actual AI resource consumption.

The shift in billing units is essentially a shift in products from "selling features" to "selling results." At the same time, behind the transformation of charging models is also the high computing cost brought by long-horizon tasks.

But clear pricing and lower costs do not equal greater willingness to pay or large-scale paid adoption. For many users, the core experience across different platforms is similar, and the learning cost of migrating between products is low. This landscape directly constrains willingness to pay and has become a core factor suppressing paid conversion in the industry.

At the same time, market analysis points out that the deeper contradiction lies in the mismatch between "employee efficiency gains" and "enterprise payment." The industry widely faces the dilemma that "employees find it useful, but the one who actually pays is the boss": improved employee efficiency does not automatically equal enterprise cost reduction and efficiency gains. Only when efficiency is ultimately translated into headcount reduction, business growth or shorter delivery cycles does it become financially visible ROI.

Data widely cited in the industry from the MIT NANDA report "The GenAI Divide" show that about 95% of enterprise generative AI pilots fail to produce measurable financial returns, with the core obstacle being the difficulty of integrating AI into enterprises' existing workflows.

Retention after subsidies fade is another hurdle. For example, the rapid growth in WorkBuddy's monthly visits relies heavily on a subsidy mechanism of points plus membership and free traffic from the WeChat ecosystem. Some users even praise the product's thoughtfulness while checking in to farm points and then switching to third-party model APIs.

However, the certainty of the market itself remains a key reason why players are going all out to compete in the AI office track. IDC data shows that the size of China's enterprise-level AI agent market was approximately 21.2 billion yuan in 2025, is expected to increase to 44.9 billion yuan in 2026, and is expected to exceed 332 billion yuan by 2029.

Demand-side growth is equally steep. Analysys data shows that in the third quarter of 2026, China's desktop AI-native office agent market continued to grow rapidly. The combined visits of 20 mainstream desktop AI-native office agent platforms exceeded 300 million in September 2026, nearly five times the growth compared with June 2026.

Gartner predicts that by the end of 2026, 40% of global enterprise applications will embed AI agents with task execution capabilities, while this proportion was still less than 5% in 2025.

Against this backdrop, the differences in each company's moat are beginning to emerge, because the barriers of the five companies are not in the same dimension. Tencent's moat lies in "first-mover advantage + ecosystem," Alibaba wins in the B-end chain, ByteDance's advantage lies in C-end traffic and organizational integration, Baidu's moat is in the depth of professional scenarios and hardware extension, and Kingsoft Office's advantage is pixel-level compatibility of document formats and deep binding with the government and enterprise market.

For example, Kingsoft Office supports private deployment to meet the data compliance requirements of highly sensitive industries such as finance and government affairs. WPS Comate has become one of the first batch of enterprise-level office agent products in China to pass the dual assessment under the "Internet Agent Governance" framework of the China Academy of Information and Communications Technology.

On August 24, Alibaba announced a placement of 80 billion Hong Kong dollars in new shares, and the net proceeds from the placement will be fully used for full-stack AI capability building, with key investment in global computing infrastructure and ultra-large-scale AI data centers. Alibaba's core advantage lies in B-end infrastructure. From Alibaba Cloud to DingTalk, it has accumulated the most complete enterprise service chain in China.

Conclusion

The AI office competition is not about who first puts large models into old software, but about who can truly take on complete work, deliver professional results, and enable those results to be continuously reused by individuals and organizations. From "can chat" to "can deliver," this capability leap is where the five giants are truly competing.

Tencent relies on first-mover advantage and its ecosystem to defend the entrance, ByteDance quickly completes organizational and brand consolidation, Alibaba bets on organization-level skill accumulation, Baidu uses internal unification in exchange for industry depth and then uses Xiaodu to open up home scenarios, while Kingsoft Office turns format compatibility and customer accumulation into a new charging model.

This article comes from the WeChat public account "Business Style Pro," author: Su He, published by 36Kr with authorization.