China's office AI war: Feishu, WorkBuddy, Qwen Office and DuMate push agents
On Sept 15, 2026, ByteDance held its Feishu annual conference in Beijing, where Liang Rubo appeared for the first time to back Doubao Work; Feishu 8.0 treats agents as "organization members" that can be pulled into group chats to write docs, edit multi-dimensional tables, schedule meetings, join calls and start approvals, alongside a team-level agent called Doubao Work Companion that is still in co-creation with enterprises. The piece compares Tencent's WorkBuddy, Alibaba's Qwen Office, Baidu's DuMate and Feishu using vendor-reported figures: Feishu says H1 ARR grew 2.5x year on year and agent-callable features rose from 247 to 767 with execution success up from 78% to 95%; WorkBuddy claims 20.97M PC monthly visits in June and raised enterprise pricing from 78 to 198 yuan per user per month; Qwen Office claims 30M users in its first month, roughly 100% faster single-task generation and 75% lower token consumption; DuMate claims 150 iterations in five months and 60x growth in daily queries. It argues models are no longer the moat, with workflow and the combination of model, enterprise context, tool permissions and security governance deciding the outcome.
The contest may decide the default entry point for everyday office work in China and puts agent compute bills, permission boundaries and governance on the table early.