Alibaba sends AI ‘digital employees’ to work in rival apps from ByteDance, Tencent

Alibaba Group has introduced AI-powered "digital employees" that can be utilized within rival office platforms belonging to ByteDance and Tencent, marking a new competitive frontier in enterprise AI. The QoderWake tool, launched by Alibaba Cloud, enables users to generate fully functional workers by describing the required role in a single line.

These digital employees can seamlessly operate within Alibaba's DingTalk, ByteDance's Feishu, and Tencent's WeCom platforms, autonomously absorbing context from shared documents, calendars, and group chats. The tool offers 10 pre-set roles, such as product manager, data analyst, and front-end developer, which are fine-tuned using data from top industry teams, allowing them to perform real-world tasks without further training.

Since its launch in April, QoderWake has deployed nearly 100,000 digital employees, executing around 2 million tasks in various enterprise scenarios over the past three months. This move reflects the aggressive pivot of Chinese tech giants towards AI-driven business applications capable of executing complex workflows while simultaneously adopting a more open approach by incorporating rival products at the application layer.

Brief written by urgent.news from South China Morning Post's own syndicated text. Machine-written — may contain errors; check the original before relying on it.