Alibaba's DingTalk ONE: The AI gamble that failed

In the race to dominate the artificial intelligence era, Alibaba's enterprise platform DingTalk has experienced a significant setback with the failure of its AI service, DingTalk ONE. The ambitious project, designed to centralize and intelligently manage vast amounts of work-related information, ultimately faltered due to internal strategic disagreements and a rapid development cycle.

DingTalk, launched in 2015 as Alibaba's answer to Tencent's WeChat in the business-to-business market, evolved into an all-in-one work platform. It boasts 800 million cumulative users and 26 million registered companies in China. In 2025, amid a global AI transformation boom, Alibaba's CEO, Eddie Wu, brought back DingTalk's co-founder, Chen Hang, to spearhead the company's AI initiatives.

Hang's vision for DingTalk ONE was to create a service where AI proactively organizes information, from chat messages and emails to meeting minutes and documents, presenting it in easily digestible card formats. The goal was to reduce the burden on employees by making work find them, rather than the other way around. However, this vision clashed with the company's core B2B identity.

Product managers, like former employee Teng Yaxin, believed the service should prioritize general employees, aiming to boost their efficiency and thus increase active user numbers. Conversely, DingTalk's management insisted that the primary target audience must be corporate executives, as they are the ones paying for the service. This fundamental disagreement over who the AI should serve, the individual employee or the management, fueled extensive debates throughout the development process.

Teng Yaxin's 75,000-character internal post detailing the project's lifecycle, from conception to failure, caused a significant stir within Alibaba and the broader Chinese tech industry, reportedly leading to the swift replacement of the DingTalk CEO. The narrative of DingTalk ONE serves as a cautionary tale about the pitfalls of rapid AI development, where strategic clarity can be lost in the pursuit of market dominance.

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The most difficult thing for a planner to escape is usually not failure, but success. Failure leaves scars, but success leaves a sensation.