In the post-“lobster” era, the AI office track is becoming a “must-have” for giants.
Since August this year, a trend has become increasingly obvious – various “lobster-like applications” are bidding farewell to the “Warring States Era” where the heroes were divided. The Lobster apps originally launched by different internal teams of “Horse Racing” under Tencent, Alibaba, and Byte are gradually being centralized into three single brands: WorkBuddy, Qianwen Office, and Doubao Work.
“Which one of these three AI office applications is better?” The Beijing News Shell Finance reporter tested from multiple dimensions such as long-thread report writing, advertising video production, comic generation, and recording summary, and found that the three applications are not lacking in brilliance, but they inevitably make mistakes.
Among them, Doubao Work produced a blockbuster advertising video with a sense of real-time based on just a photo of headphones, but the 3D model generation task “magically modified” the actual photo; Qianwen Office output the richest report on long-distance tasks, but it also “burned money” so much that the reporter had to top up to save the day; WorkBuddy was the most open, but there were also times when it mistook its own icon for a “turquoise pig face” when generating comics.
The test results show that although AI office applications have improved compared to the beginning of the year, the “illusion” of AI agents still exists, and no application can achieve all-round lead.
Big manufacturers are collectively “retreating”, but the products of the three giants still have ecological barriers
Within two or three months, major manufacturers almost completed their organization and product collection at the same time.
Ali was the first to take a stance. On August 3, Qianwen Office launched a public beta test with a high profile. News came out from within Alibaba that it had completed the organizational gathering of the three teams of Wukong, MuleRun, and QoderWork, and established the Qianwen Office Division. Soon after the Shell Finance reporter registered for Qianwen Office, he received multiple return calls, text messages, and DingTalk messages, which shows that Alibaba attaches great importance to the user experience of this product.
On August 25, Byte released the beanbag work. Prior to this, Byte also completed the merger of the Doubao, Feishu, and Huoshan engine teams. The product teams of ArkClaw, TRAE, Kouzi, Feishu OpenClaw and other products have been fully or partially integrated into Doubao work. On September 15, Byte CEO Liang Rubo appeared at the 2026 Feishu Future Infinity Conference and the Doubao work kick-off meeting, marking the first “merger” of Feishu and Doubao work on the platform.
In contrast, Tencent “sits firmly on Diaoyutai.” WorkBuddy is currently the most eye-catching application in the “Lobster War”. Ma Huateng said in his 2026Q2 Tencent financial report speech that it has achieved “breakthrough user growth.” On September 24, Tencent officially shut down QClaw, which was originally a “horse race” with WorkBuddy. It is reported that the relevant businesses and teams of the QClaw Product Center have also been adjusted to WorkBuddy’s department.
This collective action sent a signal: domestic major manufacturers have gradually passed the exploratory period of multi-product horse racing, began to shrink resources, and found a product that can stabilize the bottom line for their own ecology.
Judging from the interfaces of Doubao Work, Qianwen Office, and WorkBuddy, there is not much difference between the three. screenshot
Shell Finance reporters discovered ecological barriers during testing. For example, pictures in the WeChat chat box can be dragged smoothly to WorkBuddy, but they cannot be dragged directly to Doubao Work and Qianwen Office. In the past month, when reporters communicated with the product managers of the above-mentioned AI applications, they often emphasized the linkage of their own applications, such as DingTalk for Qianwen Office, Feishu for Doubao Work, and Baidu Netdisk for Baidu Tiezi. This means to a certain extent that AI office applications are still the continuation of the respective ecosystems of major manufacturers.
Writing a research report: Doubao drew illustrations for the report, and Qianwen wrote 50,000 words
Since September this year, Beijing News Shell Finance reporters have successively conducted a series of actual task tests on three AI office applications: WorkBuddy, Qianwen Office, and Doubao Work. Among them, WorkBuddy uses the Hy4 preview model when executing tasks, Qianwen Office uses the Qwen3.87-Max model, and Doubao uses the new version of Doubao 2.1 Lite0921 model. These models are all the most advanced models owned by Tencent, Alibaba, and Byte, ensuring that the “original team” of major manufacturers are used to perform tasks.
In order to test the capabilities of intelligent agents for long-term tasks, the reporter asked the above three applications to generate a “2026 AI Office Track Research Report”. Among them, Doubao Work dispatched 4 “research sub-agents” and completed the report writing in 20 minutes and 46 seconds, with a total of 10,000 words; WorkBuddy retrieved the historical records of the reporter’s previous work from the workspace and completed the “understanding” task in 21 minutes and 18 seconds. The report was written with a total of 25,000 words; Qianwen Office was the most rigorous. Before the task began, it confirmed the delivery format, length and depth, and focus of the report with the reporter in the form of “single choice + multiple choice questions”. The final task process took more than an hour and the final draft was 50,000 words.
From left to right are screenshots of research reports generated by Doubao Work, WorkBuddy, and Qianwen Office.
Judging from the results, all three AI models provided in-depth research reports that met the requirements, including detailed data analysis, comparison standards, and source lists. Formally, Doubao Work’s report has the most beautiful appearance, not only producing tables, but also histograms and capability radar charts; WorkBuddy provides many unique observation angles, such as “Users are not choosing the strongest AI, but choosing where my existing data is stored.” Qianwen Office provides the most detailed and informative research report, involving a two-order-of-magnitude gap between the monthly active volume of AI office applications and its parent app, and a detailed summary of the attitudes of executives from major manufacturers toward AI office applications.
However, this report with the largest number of words is not cheap. For this task, Beanbao Work consumes 31.91 tokens (word elements), and WorkBuddy consumes about 30 tokens, which can be covered by using the free credit. In comparison, Qwen-3.8Max of Qianwen Office consumed about 1,800 tokens in one go, almost 60 times more than the former. Because the tokens were consumed too quickly, the reporter had to temporarily recharge 78 yuan to purchase a one-month membership.
WorkBuddy comic generation recognized its own icon wrongly, and 3D generation made a “turnaround”
In the multi-modal ability test, the ability to generate comics, advertising posters, videos, and 3D models is involved.
The reporter from Shell Finance sent screenshots of the desktop icons of Doubao Work, Qianwen Office, and WorkBuddy to the above-mentioned AI application, and entered the prompt word “Design a cartoon in which three villains with the above icons are fighting each other.”
From left to right are screenshots of research reports generated by Doubao Work, Qianwen Office, and WorkBuddy.
The results showed that Doubao Work generated a cartoon with an icon on top of it. Qianwen Work and WorkBuddy had a better understanding of the reporter’s intentions. The icons directly transformed into characters, making the cartoon more vivid. However, WorkBuddy “confessed” its own logo when the other two icons were generated correctly. The reporter reviewed its thinking process and found that WorkBuddy described its icon as a “white piggy face logo on a green background”, which may have caused errors in subsequent drawings.
The thought process behind WorkBuddy generating comics. screenshot
During the test, the reporter upgraded the task requirements. By taking a photo of an ordinary wired headset, three AI applications were asked to make it into an Apple-style product poster and generate a commercial featuring a real model.
Advertising posters generated based on photos of wired headphones are generated from left to right for WorkBuddy, Doubao Work, and Qianwen Office.
The results show that whether it is a poster or a video, the beanbag work based on the Seedance series model delivers more high-quality results. In this test, there were obvious differences in the video effects generated by the three AI applications. WorkBuddy’s live model has natural movements and storyboards, and there is no sound in the entire video; Qianwen Office’s video understands that “product” is the first priority, and the camera gradually pushes towards the headphones, but lacks the sense of change in the storyboard; Beanbag work has both light and shadow changes, as well as multi-level storyboards of the model holding headphones, plugging in headphones, and wearing headphones to enjoy music, and the dubbing does not make any drama, and the highest degree of completion. The reporter noticed that the same flaw appeared in the three videos, which may be due to the lack of material for wired headphones. The headphones generated by the three videos were inconsistent with the real ones.
For the 3D model generation test, which tests the ability more, a reporter from Shell Finance uploaded four photos of anime girl figures from different angles and asked to “make a 3D model of the figure so that I can rotate it from all angles directly through the browser by dragging it with the mouse.”
The upper left corner is a photo of the original figure, the upper right corner is the 3D model generated by WorkBuddy, the lower left corner is the bean bag work generation, and the lower right corner is the 3D model generated by Qianwen Office.
The 3D models of Doubao Worker and Qianwen Office directly compress the figures into a rough style. Among them, the characters in Qianwen Office are cruder than Doubao Worker. WorkBuddy generated a 3D model that was almost identical to the original figure. In terms of the control of lens selection, Doubao Work and WorkBuddy are both very natural, while Qianwen Office has a certain degree of lag.
In actual tests, reporters found that the current AI application capabilities have improved significantly compared with when “lobster” became popular at the beginning of this year. Faced with the difficulties encountered when executing tasks, such as the lack of necessary components in the computer environment, “lobsters” were often unable to solve them independently before and needed help from users. However, in this actual test, the above-mentioned AI office applications showed various “fancy solutions” in the thinking process.
During a transcription task of a consultation recording, Doubao Work encountered a situation where security software intercepted the network, making the task difficult to complete. In the process of searching for a solution, it discovered the transcribed material that WorkBuddy had completed earlier. The Beanbao work decided to “generate normative documents based on existing transcripts and synchronize relevant situations.”
The decision-making process when network requests are intercepted during the execution of beanbag tasks. screenshot
However, as “lobsters” spread all over the place to the top three retreating, the AI office track is gradually moving out of the “can it be used” stage, but the illusion has not disappeared. Under the homogenization task, ecological migration costs, token consumption, etc. will become implicit criteria for user selection, and the balance between capabilities and costs will determine who can retain heavy users.
According to data obtained by the Beijing News Shell Finance reporter from Xsignal, in August this year, the top three applications by monthly active users of the AI office track APP + WEB were WorkBuddy, Baidu Lazi, and Kouzi. This shows that the effect of the integration of the aforementioned giants has not yet been fully realized in the short term. It is still unclear whether the future will be a “separation of heroes” and “three kingdoms” or a product that can “unify the world.”
In August 2026, an overview of the number of monthly active users of the AI office application APP + WEB. Produced by Luo Yidan, Beijing News Shell Finance Reporter Data source: Xsignal
Produced by Beijing News Shell Finance reporters Du Xiaotong and Ren Wanqing Data source: Xsignal
Reporter contact email: luoyidan@xjbnews.com
Luo Yidan, chief reporter of Beijing News Shell Finance
Editor Wang Jinyu
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