DingTalk

DingTalk is a program for collaboration within companies. It comes from the Chinese internet conglomerate Alibaba and runs on mobile, on computers, and in the browser. Employees write messages to each other, make video calls, and share files. Added to this are typical office tasks: clocking working hours, requesting vacation, submitting travel expenses. In China the app is known under the name 钉钉 (pronounced roughly “Ding Ding”) and is used by several million organizations. You can think of it as a mix of WhatsApp, Zoom, and the HR department’s administrative forms.

Why an office app is becoming an AI showcase

For Alibaba, DingTalk is more than a chat program. The conglomerate has developed its own large language models, i.e. AI systems that can understand and write text. These models are called Qwen. For them to generate revenue, they need users. DingTalk provides exactly these users, because millions of people already work there every day.

This explains why the app regularly appears in business news. Analysts watch how quickly Alibaba integrates its AI into existing products. A language model directly inside the work chat is a test under real-world conditions. If it works there, it can also be sold to other companies.

A second point is competition. In China, DingTalk competes primarily with WeChat Work from the conglomerate Tencent and with Lark from ByteDance, the parent company of TikTok. All three are building in AI features. Whoever wins here sits on the work data of very many companies. This is a strategically valuable position, similar to the one Microsoft holds in Europe and the US with Teams and Office.

What holds the app together technically

At its core, DingTalk is a platform. The provider supplies the basic functions, i.e. chat, calls, calendar, and file storage. On top of this, companies build their own workflows. A company can, for example, specify that a vacation request first goes to the team leader and then to HR. Such rules can be assembled by clicking, without any programming knowledge.

The data is not stored on the phone but on Alibaba’s servers. This design is called the cloud: computing power and storage sit in large data centers and are used over the internet. This is why Alibaba can roll out new features for everyone at once, without anyone having to install anything.

The AI features sit as an additional layer on top. An assistant summarizes long group chats, writes minutes from video conferences, and drafts replies. To do this, the app sends the text to a language model and returns the result. The important difference from a plain chatbot is this: the AI here has access to the work context, i.e. to calendars, documents, and previous messages. That is exactly what makes it useful and at the same time raises questions about data privacy.

DingTalk outside China

In Germany, you rarely encounter the app in everyday life. It becomes relevant when you have dealings with China. Companies with locations or suppliers there often use DingTalk for coordination. Schools and universities in China also use it for teaching and assignment distribution, especially since the remote-learning phases of the pandemic.

In the news, the name usually appears in connection with Alibaba’s quarterly results or AI announcements. A common misconception is that DingTalk itself is an AI. That is not true. It is a work platform into which AI has been built. A second misconception: the app is not the same as WeChat. WeChat is a private messenger app for everyone, DingTalk is tailored to businesses.

There is also criticism. Because supervisors can see whether a message has been read, and because working hours can be tracked via location, many regard the app as a tool of close control. It is thus a good example of how the same technology can both make work easier and enable surveillance.