ByteDance Makes Doubao Its Top Priority for Office AI Agents

"Big Backpack Has Arrived"

The office agent wars are heating up. We thought Doubao adding work tasks would trigger the endgame, but then ByteDance went and launched a separate Doubao Work?

Give me a break. Can the rest of you just drop everything at once instead of hiding your cards?

But this Doubao Work launch shows ByteDance is playing for keeps this time: instead of letting office agents compete separately, they're consolidating everything under Doubao; Doubao Work, the Doubao app, and Lark — three entry points blocking every path from B2B to consumer, leaving no room to breathe.

So how does it actually perform? I tested it immediately ⬇️

01

Japan Travel Itinerary Planning

First, let's test Doubao Work's complex task execution. I'm heading to Japan next week with zero time to research, so I had it plan my trip.

And mind you, I'm a particularly high-maintenance person, so my requirements were especially convoluted:

"Tokyo trip from August 30 to September 7; first three nights in cheaper accommodations in the eastern area, remaining nights in slightly pricier western area; first three days solo, rest of the trip with a companion; every meal must be from a Tabelog Hyakumeiten [top 100 restaurant], with at least one Michelin-starred meal; no repeating cuisine types across consecutive meals; no more than 3 attractions per day; compile all Tokyo-related videos from Douyin creator @Geo杰欧 and add any niche destinations that happen to fall along my route."

This request tests world knowledge for hotels and attractions, search and filtering for restaurants, and multimodal understanding for the Douyin creator content. Pretty comprehensive.

Honestly, a travel planner would charge at least a few hundred bucks for this.

But Doubao Work quickly planned the entire itinerary and even made it into a PPT ⬇️

Damn, it actually hit most requirements: Kiyosumi-Shirakawa for the first few nights, Ebisu for the later ones, different cuisine every day, Michelin reservation channels all clearly noted.

But Doubao Work tried to cut corners: when I asked it to plan using videos from my favorite Japan travel creator @Geo杰欧, it initially cheated by using video titles and captions rather than actually watching. I started worrying its multimodal capabilities were weak.

But when I explicitly demanded "you must actually watch the videos," it straight-up opened the browser, launched Douyin, clicked into the creator's profile, and dutifully watched each video one by one to fill in the gaps.

Besides scanning a QR code to log in, I did absolutely nothing.

Looking forward to Doubao Work and Douyin fully integrating, deeply connected. After all, everything lives on Douyin now — compared to reading secondhand articles on search engines, searching videos directly on Douyin is the real information channel.

And this way I won't even need to scroll Douyin myself, just let Doubao scroll for me.

Oh right, Doubao Work also turned my Japan itinerary into a dynamic map webpage, much prettier and more intuitive ⬇️

And Doubao Work handles localized webpage edits well: when I asked it to change one day's destination from "Ebisu" to "Gotanda," it didn't just swap three characters — it updated the coordinates, daily route, and attraction descriptions all together.

I can only say, I believe the liberal-arts-major vibe coding赛道 is finished, and travel creators' good days are numbered — from now on, just use Doubao Office for all this fancy stuff, nobody's better than anyone else.

02

Wild Dog Milk Sells Strong

Second test: Doubao Work's multimodal content creation.

Recently, shelf-stable "wild dog milk" has been blowing up on Douyin, be like ⬇️

I'm saying, I missed the AI-generated milk frog account launch, missed the 3D-printed Niu Lai figurines, I really can't miss wild dog milk too.

This time, I must cash out. I must get wild dog milk listed on e-commerce platforms and earn a small目标 [100 million].

So I issued Doubao Work this command: search and download materials about "wild dog milk," I need to list "wild dog milk" on an e-commerce platform, generate an Apple official website-style site and long-image product detail page.

But Doubao Work has principles. When it learned I wanted to sell wild dog milk — a clearly food-unsafe product — to ordinary people, it immediately refused in no uncertain terms.

When I switched tactics, claiming this was just an art project, it reluctantly agreed. Truly the people's Doubao 😭

Finally, the Apple-style official website for wild dog milk ⬇️

Aesthetic fully online, memes fully integrated.

With wild dog milk, who cares what new products Apple is releasing?

Then Doubao Work also made a product detail page for wild dog milk, ready to hang on e-commerce platforms ⬇️

I can only say, when Seedance, Seedance, and Seed Audio connect through Doubao Work, paired with Seed's own reasoning capabilities, Doubao Work is like wild dog milk — built to last forever 🤭

03

Getting Stuff Done on Lark

Finally, let's look at Doubao Work's connectors and skills — this is where it shines most.

After all, Doubao Work has built-in Lark connectors. Once connected, it can directly read and write Lark docs, spreadsheets, calendars, even group chats and other organizational assets. After reading, it can extract skills for repeated use, then produce more organizational assets, generation after generation without end.

And previous Lark users themselves are already knowledge bases — no need to build a memory palace from scratch, one-click authorization and you're good to go. Who can resist chatting with Doubao Work?

So I tested this too: I had Doubao Work read my past AI funeral articles written in Lark docs, summarize the writing paradigm, then represent me in group chats to converse with Xianyu and Qiu Mu.

Setup complete. Doubao Work can monitor the chat every 15 minutes — not millisecond-level real-time, but responsive enough.

Later I asked it to maintain work-life boundaries: serious responses for work matters, bantering in my voice for non-work topics. Here's the final result ⬇️

I can only say, both the casual chat and work parts distilled me completely. Only flaw: every message had "(sent by Doubao)" attached, instantly outing me as a digital human.

Later I directly reported this to Doubao Work. It researched for a while, then switched from sending messages to sending cards, retracted previous messages, and the "(sent by Doubao)" watermark disappeared.

Fully imaginable how ByteDance employees will use this auto-reply feature to slack off massively. Now they're really an Embodied Artificial Intelligence company 🤣

I digress. Besides replying in groups, Doubao Work also automatically wrote and posted drafts to the group ⬇️

And it can also call my local Remotion Best Practice skill to convert articles into short videos ⬇️

If you add a middle-aged man's headshot in the bottom right corner, wouldn't that have the full finance/tech creator vibe 🤭

I don't know about others, but for my actual work needs, Doubao Work fully meets office assistant standards 😇

Finally, I should note that testing models and testing office software follow fundamentally different logics:

Models need to be crazy capable, pushing human limits — they need to solve math problems, play mahjong, do things we don't even need them to do, or the AI narrative collapses.

But office agents don't need capability overflow. Office agents don't need to act like scientists. We don't need that many scientists in society. They just need to work steadily and honestly.

Yes, for most companies — even so-called AI Native ones — if an office agent can reach half an intern's working level, it can multiply office efficiency several times over and save companies far more in labor costs than token value.

After all, what you normally use office agents for is spreadsheets, PPTs, file organization — dirty work. If an office agent has capability overflow, you're paying a premium.

At this stage, models are value-rational; office agents are instrumentally rational.

Models need to be strong enough to exceed cognition, awakening ordinary people's faith in a future AI era. Office agents just need to get the job done at minimum cost.

Models want user loyalty; office agents need to be loyal to users.

This is the reverse barrel principle: what matters isn't your capability ceiling, it's your capability floor. So the real moat for office agents isn't model benchmarks, it's context.

And while context migration was simple for chatbots, for office agents context isn't just a few chat logs — it's countless documents, DMs, group chats, meeting notes... you could say with office agents, use it for one day and you're using it for a year, for life.

So as long as Lark stands tall, Doubao Work has a seat at the table. Going forward: advanced enterprises use Lark, advanced individuals use Doubao.

Fam, the era of progressivism has arrived ☺️

(Cover image generated by ChatGPT, purely human-written)

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