At an internal all-hands on August 6, ByteDance CEO Liang Rubo, CFO Zhou Shouzi, and heads of Doubao, e-commerce, monetization, and the creative services platform announced a shift in AI strategy, elevating Doubao lead Zhao Qi as the company’s most powerful AI product executive. The consumer side will keep Doubao competitive and protect Seedance’s video-model lead, while the main weight moves to enterprise productivity, historically ByteDance’s weakest area. The week before, ByteDance folded Lark’s product team into Doubao and pushed Lark’s sales, marketing, and customer-success functions into Volcano Engine; former Lark head Xie Xin now reports to Zhao rather than Liang. The trigger was a market shift: in June, Tencent’s desktop-native AI agent platform drew 20.97 million monthly visits in China, ranking first ahead of ByteDance’s TRAE IDE plus Alibaba’s QoderWork combined, as enterprise buyers now pay for AI agents, not collaboration tools. As of March 2026, Doubao had 345 million monthly active users and a peak daily active count of 150 million, processing 180 trillion tokens per day, up 1,500-fold since its 2024 launch. In June, Doubao Pro launched at 68, 200, and 500 yuan per month, and a Lark-integrated Doubao Enterprise edition entered closed beta. The new architecture is a