Alibaba taps China’s top AI start-ups to boost enterprise offerings

Alibaba Group Holding is giving developer access on DingTalk to six Chinese artificial intelligence (AI) start-ups to expand generative AI features on the workplace messaging platform, in its latest bid to gain an edge in the increasingly competitive market.

The Hangzhou-based e-commerce and cloud computing giant, which has built its own AI model Tongyi Qianwen, is partnering with MiniMax, Moonshot AI, Orionstar, Baichuan, Zhipu Ai and 01.AI to develop new AI functions for DingTalk, the platform said said on Wednesday.

The move comes as Alibaba, owner of the South China Morning Post, puts AI at the core of its business strategy and promotes DingTalk to more enterprise clients. DingTalk’s rivals, including Tencent Holdings’ WeCom and ByteDance’s Feishu, are also rushing to incorporate AI models into their products.

For the six start-ups collaborating with Alibaba, the tie-up is expected to help introduce their AI products to more users faster via China’s biggest workplace communication tool by user numbers.

By the end of 2023, DingTalk said it had over 700 million users, including 25 million organisations ranging from corporate to educational institutions.

DingTalk’s new AI partners represent some of the leading players in China’s heated race to catch up with top global competitors in the sector.

OrionStar, established in 2016, in January launched a medium-scale model Orion-14B that the company said has outstanding performance among models with less than 20 billion parameters.

DingTalk said that by combining the strengths of various models, it can provide users with a variety of offerings that include industry-specific and client-customised solutions.

For example, it is working with Moonshot AI to explore the application of AI’s long-text processing and generative capabilities in educational scenarios.

DingTalk’s start-up partners are also expected to enhance its AI agent feature, added in January to help users streamline their workflow by completing certain tasks, following a similar move by Feishu. Around 500,000 customised AI agents had been created on DingTalk by the end of May, the platform said.

Tongyi Qianwen will continue to support some existing features on DingTalk, such as instant messaging, document processing, audio and video-related functions, the platform said.

DingTalk last year integrated a number of Tongyi Qianwen-supported AI features into the platform, allowing users to compose articles or generate social media posts based on simple text prompts, and provide new members of a group chat with a summary of previous conversations.

DingTalk said it currently has over 5,600 ecosystem partners, including more than 100 entities involved in building AI models, agents, solutions and plug-ins.