ByteDance is undergoing its most dramatic strategic pivot since its founding, with founder Zhang Yiming pushing the company’s decade of accumulated resources into the AI office arena. On September 15, the integrated “Doubao Workspace” debuted at the 2026 Feishu Future Unlimited Conference, where Feishu released version 8.0. Over the past month and a half, Zhang Yiming and CEO Liang Rubo restructured the organization: in late July, an internal email announced the Feishu product team would merge into Doubao, with Feishu head Xie Xin reporting to Doubao head Zhao Qi, and the Feishu GTM team merging with Volcano Engine under Volcano head Tan Dai. In late August, AI coding tool TRAE and Coze were folded into the Doubao system. This is ByteDance’s largest AI-oriented organizational restructuring since 2021. Liang Rubo personally took the stage at the September 15 launch. The integrated Doubao Workspace will compete with Tencent’s WorkBuddy and Alibaba’s Qwen Office. Doubao has 380 million monthly active users, while ByteDance’s Seed 2.0/2.1 Pro ranks 21st on global LLM leaderboards, and Liang Rubo admitted at the August 6 all-hands meeting that the large model is temporarily lagging. ByteDance’s AI capex reached CNY 150 billion (approximately $22.4