A lengthy article sparks a commotion: Where will the post-90s new helmsman steer DingTalk?

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An article that dethroned the head of a business unit—this may be the first time at Alibaba.

On June 11, 2026, Alibaba Group announced that Chen Hang (Wuzhao), the soul of DingTalk, stepped down as CEO of DingTalk; succeeding him is Chen Yusen, only 34 years old. This tech geek, born in 1992, thus becomes the youngest business unit CEO in Alibaba’s history.

The day before this personnel change, Alibaba’s Partner Committee published “Affection, Integrity, and Growth: This Is Alibaba’s Culture.” Committee members pointed out, “Under any circumstances, no matter how urgent the tasks,” such management is “not the way Alibaba culture should be.”

The gravity of these words is clear. This is a response to the viral resignation essay, “Inside DingTalk.”

Using a journalistic approach, the article depicted the organizational atmosphere, management style, and employee feelings inside DingTalk in recent years. The discussion quickly moved from internal company matters to a wider debate about Alibaba’s culture, founder management styles, and organizational forms in the AI era.

DingTalk’s management dilemmas and long-simmering internal emotions finally found release through this essay. If management practices contrary to Alibaba’s “affection and integrity” continue, Alibaba’s cohesion and corporate culture risk being diluted.

Thus, the Partner Committee, symbolizing Alibaba’s highest authority, acted decisively, even against Wuzhao, who had delivered remarkable achievements—and even though he had only returned to DingTalk less than a year earlier.

Alibaba handed the commander’s seal to Chen Yusen, a post-90s generation figure. What he must answer is not just where DingTalk goes next, but “what kind of people Alibaba believes in during the AI era.”

The Curtain Lifted by “Inside DingTalk”

If “Inside DingTalk” were merely a sentimental essay from a departing employee, it would not have caused such an upheaval. Its true impact lay in exposing a long-sanctioned, beautified, even mythologized management paradigm—tearing away the elegant veneer.

DingTalk is a product raised single-handedly by Wuzhao. From a small team at Lakeside Garden to becoming a national-scale collaboration tool with hundreds of millions of monthly active users, Wuzhao almost single-handedly defined DingTalk’s product philosophy: extreme, demanding, unquestionable. For a long period, outsiders likened him to China’s Steve Jobs of SaaS, crediting DingTalk’s success to this “dictatorial product intuition.”

During the mobile internet boom, this approach worked, and DingTalk did carve out its own track alongside WeChat Work and Feishu.

But what “Inside DingTalk” revealed are the internal costs of this approach.

The article describes DingTalk as a place where meetings run from morning to night, requirements change constantly, KPIs are dissected to the finest detail, and employees’ rest time and family life are all sacrificed for the “product above all” belief.

To outsiders, it’s a factory that wears the guise of “refining products” but actually consumes people. This stands in stark contrast to Alibaba’s long-promoted value order of “customer first, employee second, shareholder third.”

The reason Alibaba’s Partner Committee unusually published on the intranet, using language akin to “drawing a line,” is because DingTalk’s management style had shaken the foundation of Alibaba’s culture. Amidst external branding pressure and heated AI competition, what the group needed was unequivocal cultural correction, not payment for past hero narratives.

Former DingTalk VP Zhang Sicheng bluntly said: “This is a story about a mismatch; the AI era no longer needs Steve Jobs.”

Jobs’ success at Apple depended on his extremely rare aesthetic judgment and product intuition.

But the essay's author implies that Wuzhao only learned Jobs’ expressive style (preaching, emotional appeal, personal heroism), not his accumulation of capabilities (Jobs proved himself externally with NeXT and Pixar after leaving Apple; Wuzhao’s return to DingTalk brought a company with questionable business outcomes).

The deeper issue is that a Jobs-like obsession only works when product definition power is highly centralized and technical paradigms are stable. Jobs succeeded because he stood at the paradigm shift from PC to smartphone, using his intuition to define a generation of hardware.

What “Inside DingTalk” exposed is not just a leader’s character flaw, but that DingTalk, as Alibaba’s flagship AI-to-B product, can no longer sail with outdated paradigms. What’s needed is a captain who believes in a new course.

Alibaba has handed DingTalk’s helm to Chen Yusen.

After Chen Yusen Succeeds

Chen Yusen’s background is almost the most complete sample that technical idealism can grow on Chinese soil.

Famous from a young age, he won top computing competitions at home and abroad; at 22, he founded the cybersecurity company Changting Technology, later acquired by Alibaba Cloud; he was listed in Forbes Asia’s “30 Under 30.” In 2025, he started a second venture within Alibaba Cloud, leading the development of the AI Agent product MuleRun, bringing general intelligence to practical product form.

Putting someone like him into the CEO position at DingTalk, Alibaba’s intention is clear: DingTalk’s next journey is no longer a war of product managers, but a war of Agents.

If Wuzhao represents the product entrepreneur of the mobile internet era, Chen Yusen is more like a new species from the AI era.

Over the past year, MuleRun has been regarded internally at Alibaba as the closest experiment to an AI Native organizational form. There, Agents are not just product features, but organizational members. R&D processes, collaboration methods, management scope, and even decision mechanisms are all redefined.

Many traditional internet companies still ponder how to add AI to their products, but MuleRun’s discussions have already moved to: if AI becomes part of the organization, how should the company operate? This is why many industry insiders believe Chen Yusen’s appointment is more than a routine personnel change—it’s an organizational path shift.

Wuzhao stands for the pinnacle of mobile internet-era SaaS product management: defining a national tool with personal will. Chen Yusen stands for the starting form of an AI-era Agent product leader: translating large model capabilities into organizational efficiency with an engineering approach. The former relies on intuition and authority; the latter depends on architecture, collaboration, and automation.

For DingTalk, this means the competitors have changed. It’s no longer just WeChat Work or Feishu. The real competition is now about who can first build an enterprise Agent ecosystem—who can connect people, data, processes, and AI in organizations to become the operating system of enterprises.

From this perspective, Chen Yusen’s background may be more suited to DingTalk than any traditional professional manager, because he isn’t a success story from the mobile internet era—he is a native of the AI age.

More importantly, his appointment carries another layer of meaning. In the past two years, Alibaba has undergone organizational transformation, business restructuring, and multiple rounds of executive changes. Public opinion about Alibaba has shifted from once being an innovation benchmark to increasingly labeled as conservative and slow-moving.

Especially after Lin Junyang left, discussions about Alibaba’s talent loss and declining innovation have continued. To an extent, Chen Yusen’s arrival offers a new narrative.

Alibaba can still cultivate young entrepreneurs. Alibaba is still willing to entrust important businesses to those born after 1990. Alibaba still believes in tech-driven, not seniority-driven leadership. For a company over 25 years old, this signals something even more important than any business growth.

Because in the AI era, the rarest resource is not capital, not traffic, but people who can understand the new world. Looking back at Zhang Sicheng’s words, “The AI era no longer needs Steve Jobs,” its real meaning is perhaps not a denial of Jobs.

Rather, a reminder to all tech companies: in the mobile internet era, success often came from a few geniuses defining the future. In the AI era, success increasingly depends on whether organizations can continuously learn the future.

If Chen Yusen can bring AI Native concepts proven by MuleRun into DingTalk, then this handover may mean far more than a CEO change—it could mean one of China’s largest enterprise collaboration platforms is transforming from a founder-driven product company into an AI-driven organizational company.

And this may be the transformation Alibaba most wants to complete. As for whether this is the right decision, only time can answer.

One thing is clear: as DingTalk changes its sails, the entire Chinese SaaS industry will watch for wind shifts. AI won’t change direction for the arrival or departure of any one person, but whether an organization can embrace AI often depends on whether it dares, at critical moments, to hand the helm to someone who still believes in the future.

Wuzhao’s DingTalk was one of the last product myths of the mobile internet. Chen Yusen’s DingTalk will define what collaborative office looks like in the AI era. This handover has no Steve Jobs—and perhaps, that’s its greatest value.

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