ByteDance’s Doubao cuts dialogue teams as focus shifts to monetization

This is a telling signal for China's consumer AI race: even a 200-million-DAU assistant can be restructured when dialogue monetization stalls and multimodal inference costs stay high. The cuts suggest ByteDance is treating general chat as a cost center and enterprise productivity as the nearer-term revenue path, which matters for rivals weighing similar consumer-scale bets. Whether Doubao Pro and Feishu can convert assistant traffic into paying enterprise demand — without eroding the consumer base that made Doubao prominent — is the open question.