DingTalk president Ye Jun said its users hit 700 million. Photo credit: Alibaba Group
Alibaba’s workplace communication platform DingTalk had reached 700 million users by the end of 2023, DingTalk president Ye Jun said at a press conference on Tuesday.
DingTalk also unveiled an AI agent powered by Alibaba Cloud’s large language model, Tongyi Qianwen, embedded in the platform that can serve as a workplace assistant to boost productivity.
It can perform tasks ranging from document summary generation to business trip bookings on third-party platforms. Enterprise and individual users can customize their AI assistants on DingTalk to perform tasks based on their workplace needs.
“We hope that we can make it easier for corporations and individual users to create powerful AI agents to make digitalization accessible to all,” said Ye.
As users passed another milestone, DingTalk also said at the press conference that its corporate users hit 25 million by the end of 2023, with its daily active paid users reaching 28 million and the number of paying enterprises hitting 120,000.
AI Agents at Your Service
DingTalk is one of the first in Alibaba’s ecosystem to pilot generative AI to enhance users’ experience. The latest version of DingTalk elevated the integration of generative AI to a higher level with the launch of AI agents.
AI agents, which can respond to natural language prompts and accomplish tasks across applications, are designed to meet users’ needs in various ways. Compared with traditional chatbots, AI agents can complete tasks across applications to address complex requests.
Under the latest version of DingTalk, users can also build their personal AI agents that can perform over 30 routine daily tasks, such as screen projection and setting personalized ringtones with one single click.
Corporations, on the other hand, can build AI agents to perform tasks in recruitment and financial analysis. The AI agents can also generate business insights and analysis based on corporate users’ requests, such as addressing customer service requests about product use and running sales performance analysis.
As corporations unleash the power of generative AI, DingTalk also announced that it would launch a marketplace for AI agents in its ecosystem. Over 10 million AI agents are expected to grow on DingTalk in the next three years, according to the platform.
Help at Your Fingertips
To make it easier for users to access generative AI-enabled services, DingTalk announced that starting Tuesday, Alibaba Cloud’s LLM Tongyi Qianwen will be accessible on DingTalk’s service account.
Users can simply search for “Tongyi Qianwen” on DingTalk to access a range of services, from report drafting to code generation. They can input their requests in natural language, in text or audio format, and the platform will generate responses in text or images, powered by a suite of large language models from Alibaba Cloud, including Tongyi Qianwen, Tongyi Wanxiang and large vision language model Qwen-VL.
Alibaba Cloud started rolling out its LLM Tongyi Qianwen in April last year. It’s been made available to the public through its website and mobile application and through APIs for developers.
