ByteDance AI Apps Consolidated Again: Xiaoyunque Merged into Jimeng

By Deng Yongyi

Edited by Zhang Yuxin

We understand that this adjustment is primarily about resource integration, and Jimeng has now incorporated Xiaoyunque's short-drama-related capabilities. After the adjustment, Xiaoyunque's operations are overseen by Chen Xinran, head of operations and marketing at Jimeng, while the product team remains unchanged.

The main reasons for this round of business integration at Jianying are limited growth space and the need to focus resources. A former Jianying employee told "Intelligent Emergence" that although AI-native products like Jimeng and Xiaoyunque continue to grow, user growth has not yet effectively translated into returns commensurate with the investment, and the rise of numerous video Agent products on the market is also continuously compressing the differentiation space of in-house products.

Behind this round of adjustment, more importantly, is a broader context: after the major tech companies refocused their efforts on foundation models, everyone reassessed the priority of AI applications. ByteDance is the fastest and most aggressive of these major companies—in addition to merging the Jimeng and Xiaoyunque teams, they are also discussing the possibility of merging other AI products.

In early 2024, after Zhang Nan stepped down as CEO of Douyin Group, she shifted to overseeing Jianying and CapCut. In May of the same year, Jianying launched Jimeng. At that time, Sora had just burst onto the scene, and there was no clear answer as to whether AI video products or Chatbots would become the next super app or entry point—this is why ByteDance invested in both Doubao and Jimeng. Zhang Nan also publicly stated, "I hope Jimeng is not just a creation tool, but can also explore a content community for the AI era."

Since then, Jimeng's product focus has changed several times. At the outset, Jimeng envisioned a division of labor similar to Jianying and Douyin: the Web side would be a creation tool, and the App side would handle consumption; after the launch of the Seedance model, the App side also tried Sora-like live-action appearances and digital avatar interaction.

As model capabilities improved, many ordinary users could complete AI creation directly in Douyin and Doubao. The product capabilities carried by Jimeng therefore extended from text-to-video and image-to-video to Agent editing capabilities such as first-and-last frames and smart canvas, gradually moving closer to professional creators.

According to "Intelligent Emergence," before this year's National Day, Jimeng had already reduced investment in the App side, pushing for the merger of the App and Web sides, with future resources to be concentrated on the Web side aimed at professional creators. After that, Jimeng will also increase investment in the overseas version Dreamina, as well as commercialization.

Over these two years, model capabilities have improved rapidly, and the market's logic for evaluating applications has changed accordingly. After Coding Agent opened up the AI office market, the saying "the model is the application" became increasingly mainstream. After ByteDance launched Seedance 2.0 in February 2026, the relationship between models and applications within the system also underwent subtle changes.

Even before the release of Seedance 2.0, there was competition among Xiaoyunque, Jimeng, Jianying, and Doubao over who would get the first launch rights to Seedance. A person at Volcano Engine told "Intelligent Emergence" that this situation became even more intense after the 2.0 release—the model has already become the party with stronger bargaining power.

Limited product growth also indirectly led to a "startup wave" from the Jianying circle over the past two years, with a group of senior product and operations executives leaving one after another to start businesses, including Chen Mian (former global commercialization and operations head of Jianying and CapCut), Ming Chaoping (head of mobile editing at Jianying), Naonao (product manager at Jianying), and Zhang Qizhi (product head at Jianying). At the end of 2024, we also exclusively reported that Zhang Xiaoran, product head of Jianying, had left; she later joined Flova.ai, the startup founded by former Jianying founder Guo Lie.

At the same time, Volcano Engine is vigorously expanding Seedance's MaaS services, and almost all video Agent and short-drama/comic-drama workflows in China have integrated Seedance. We understand that for the Seedance series models, the revenue brought by Volcano Engine's MaaS services is far higher than that of products like Jimeng and Xiaoyunque.

This directly changed ByteDance's logic for measuring the value of its in-house AI applications. When a large number of video applications on the market can integrate the model and find paying users, in-house AI video applications like Xiaoyunque and Jimeng need to prove how much additional return they can bring in customer acquisition, retention, and monetization, and how much differentiation there is between them.

This article is from the WeChat public account "Intelligent Emergence," author: Deng Yongyi, published by 36Kr with authorization.