(Aug 24): ByteDance Ltd is consolidating the resources behind two of its artificial intelligence (AI) developer products to bolster China’s most popular chatbot and fight off challengers including Tencent Holdings Ltd.

The teams behind the coding platform Trae and the agent-building tool Coze are being merged into the ChatGPT-style chatbot Doubao, according to people familiar with the matter who asked not to be identified discussing private information. The company will also launch an independent app branded Doubao Work as early as this week, the people said, to enter a burgeoning market dominated by Tencent’s WorkBuddy.

The moves bolster ByteDance’s campaign to consolidate its AI product efforts under the Doubao banner. Doubao already functions as a budding all-in-one AI super-app, allowing users to generate audio transcripts, listen to podcasts and create videos and images.

Closely held ByteDance, whose businesses include TikTok, recently folded its workplace collaboration software Lark into the Doubao team to better align product and technical resources.

A ByteDance spokesperson didn’t provide immediate comment. Chinese tech outlet 36Kr earlier reported on the reorganisation.

China’s AI-powered productivity market has expanded following the rise of OpenClaw. Tencent led the market with 21 million monthly visits in June for WorkBuddy, the country’s most used AI office tool, with Trae being the distant runner-up. Another contender, Alibaba Group Holding Ltd, also recently folded a slew of smaller AI office tools into its Qwen Work, a workspace-agent platform.

ByteDance has had mixed success in the post-ChatGPT era. Its video generation model Seedance is widely used by film studios and creators, resulting in high-margin revenue for its cloud business. Yet its large language models lag behind open-weight rivals such as Moonshot’s Kimi and DeepSeek.

Doubao has emerged as a TikTok-calibre product success. It now uses a tiered subscription model while maintaining a free version for basic, everyday use — a strategy Baidu Inc abandoned for its Ernie Bot.

Uploaded by Tham Yek Lee