Wuzhao Winds Up DingTalk: Late-Night Inspections, Product Overhauls, and the Battle with Feishu

When Chen Hang returned to DingTalk as CEO in March 2025, he did not ease back in. After a four-year absence, Wuzhao — the name he is known by across China's enterprise software industry — walked into an organization that had drifted far from the startup intensity he had built. His response was characteristically blunt. Within weeks, DingTalk's Hangzhou headquarters began operating under a new rhythm. Teams were required to be in the office by 9 AM. Late-night inspections became routine — Wuzhao himself would walk the floors past midnight, checking on project progress in person. Managers faced unannounced Python coding exams to test their technical literacy, a direct challenge to what he saw as bureaucratic complacency. The message was clear: DingTalk needed a reset, not a refresh. The centerpiece of this overhaul was ONE, an AI assistant product conceived as DingTalk's answer to the large language model era. Launched publicly in August 2025, ONE aimed to collapse the fragmented workflow of messaging, meetings, approvals, and documents into a single AI-driven interface — essentially an enterprise-grade version of Douyin's algorithmic feed, but for work tasks. It reached roughly 3 million daily active users, a respectable number that nonetheless fell short of the existential transformation Wuzhao had envisioned. Yet ONE's trajectory exposed a deeper tension. DingTalk was built from the ground up with management DNA: DING notifications, read receipts, approval flows, and attendance tracking all serve organizational control. An AI assistant that empowers individual employees can just as easily become a tool for management surveillance. The product struggled to reconcile these competing identities, and as internal priorities shifted, ONE was gradually deprioritized. The organizational whiplash at DingTalk reflects the broader pressure Wuzhao faces from ByteDance's Feishu, known internationally as Lark. Feishu has positioned itself as the modern, design-conscious alternative for China's white-collar workforce, and the numbers tell a stark story. Feishu commands approximately $300 million in annual recurring revenue, outpacing DingTalk's roughly $200 million. DingTalk still leads in sheer scale with around 200 million monthly active users to Feishu's 30 million — but Feishu's user base skews toward higher-value enterprise customers, giving it a monetization edge that DingTalk has struggled to match. Wuzhao is now betting that AI offers DingTalk a second chance to define the category. His return has injected a jolt of raw energy into an organization that had grown comfortable. But in the high-stakes battle between Alibaba's workhorse and ByteDance's challenger, discipline alone may not be enough to close the revenue gap.