Kingsoft does not want to follow Microsoft's old path

Author | Liu Baodan

Editor | Huang Yu

As the Chinese version of "Microsoft Office," Kingsoft Office has maintained a high degree of similarity with Microsoft in product form for many years. Now, with AI entering the implementation phase of Agents, Kingsoft Office is expected to carve out a new path.

Recently, Kingsoft Office launched WPS Lingxi at the World Artificial Intelligence Conference. This is an AI assistant that meets personal office needs, capable of completing document creation, presentation generation, and voice assistant functions through natural language and multi-turn dialogue, aimed at enhancing office efficiency.

This also marks the launch of WPS AI version 3.0. Tian Ran, Assistant President of Kingsoft Office, stated that the capabilities of office AI have upgraded from tools to AI assistants. "WPS AI 3.0 is exploring the redefinition of the interaction relationship among users, AI, and software, promoting the evolution of AI office towards Agentic Software."

Behind the series of new product launches is Kingsoft's in-depth insight into office software in the AI era.

In the past, the AI industry generally faced two major issues: first, AI capabilities were hidden behind software; users could see the software becoming more powerful, but the AI's capabilities could not be fully utilized; second, users invoked AI capabilities through chatbots, but the content generated in a single instance seemed flashy but was not practical.

Based on this, WPS AI 3.0 attempts to promote the deep integration of AI and office software. "It's not about teaching AI 10,000 APIs of the software, but about making a two-way transformation of AI and software tailored to scenarios, where software is designed with proprietary capabilities for AI, while also teaching AI to communicate deeply with the software. Ultimately, through multi-turn communication among users, software, and AI, we output truly usable content," Tian Ran stated.

More importantly, Kingsoft Office has begun to move away from the early focus on "format restoration" and basic function replication in its approach to AI product development, entering an innovation phase driven by user needs. This will be a process of atomic reorganization of AI and software.

Tian Ran told Wall Street Insight that Kingsoft's past product path has been relatively consistent because Microsoft has established a recognized standard in document structure. Kingsoft Office is the best restorer of Microsoft formats and has done well in replicating the entire ecosystem created by Microsoft in China. However, the emergence of AI has allowed Kingsoft Office to see the possibility of changing this status quo.

Over the past three years, Kingsoft Office has been developing AI products. In 2023, Kingsoft Office launched WPS AI, introducing a series of AI functions around three major directions: AIGC (content creation), Copilot (intelligent assistant), and Insight (knowledge insight); in 2024, it will launch WPS AI 2.0, focusing on specific enterprise scenarios to build an "enterprise brain" for organizations.

Tian Ran admitted that when developing WPS AI 1.0 in 2023, there were still many product inertia issues, including some inertia of AI products, as AI was in its early stages and the company wanted to quickly produce products. However, after many foundational AI capabilities went live, they did not align with actual user needs, which is the conclusion Kingsoft Office reached based on over 100 million daily active users Kingsoft has begun to return to the essence of its products. Tian Ran stated that users do not want a flashy product, but rather a solution to practical problems. "On the path of practicality, our current product form is different from that of some fancier AI companies, and we believe this path will bring us closer to users." He revealed that the Microsoft product form seen in the market is Microsoft Copilot, which belongs to a version prior to WPS AI 3.0.

Currently, in some components of WPS Office, a screen interaction form has been established with the Office suite on the left and WPS Lingxi on the right. Users can directly express their needs in natural language in the dialogue box on the right, and after the AI recognizes the user's intent, it can modify the document area on the left without needing to switch to other applications.

In the industry’s view, compared to other products, Lingxi has advantages such as multi-turn dialogue, controllable modifications, and format retention, enabling it to generate results that are genuinely usable by users.

In terms of AI PPT, Kingsoft Office has introduced a brand new PPT creation mode, allowing users to modify the PPT outline while conversing with the AI, and also fine-tune templates, single pages, and layouts, achieving "what you think is what you modify, what you modify is what you get," making it easy to create the desired PPT.

Renowned PPT designer Feng Zhulong believes that a good PPT requires logical thinking, clear expression, and excellent design. Traditional one-click generated PPTs struggle to meet this standard, often distorting the original intent or over-exaggerating. The innovation of WPS Lingxi lies in its ability to "chat out" the PPT outline with AI and support secondary fine-tuning of details such as changing templates, colors, and images, enabling ordinary people to become PPT production experts.

The Lingxi voice assistant brings AI dialogue and document processing capabilities to mobile office scenarios. Users can directly communicate with AI via voice on their mobile devices, quickly obtaining document key points and information from the internet, for example, investment managers can find key information in hundreds of pages of financial reports.

Additionally, the WPS knowledge base has officially debuted with the launch of WPS AI 3.0. It can upgrade users' cloud documents into a knowledge base, allowing users to search for answers, filter data, and write plans, articles, and reports based on private domain knowledge, addressing the challenges of fragmented knowledge retrieval, application, and sharing, thereby improving work and learning efficiency.

According to the first-quarter financial report, Kingsoft Office achieved operating revenue of 1.301 billion yuan, a year-on-year increase of 6.22%, of which WPS personal business revenue reached 857 million yuan, a year-on-year increase of 10.86%, contributing nearly two-thirds of total revenue.

Behind this is Kingsoft Office's active adjustment of operational strategies, focusing on increasing the number of active AI users and promoting continuous growth in paid users. As of the end of March 2025, the global monthly active devices for WPS Office reached 647 million.

By breaking down 37 years of experience into atomic capabilities, Kingsoft is rewriting the human-computer collaboration operating system with AI. When natural dialogue replaces complex menu clicks, when "chatting while modifying" bridges the gap between conception and execution, and when personal knowledge bases become a wisdom external brain that can be called upon at any time, the "user-AI-software" triangular collaborative paradigm constructed by WPS AI 3.0 not only significantly lowers the threshold for intelligent office work but also redefines the boundaries of human-computer collaboration A vast ecosystem composed of over 600 million active devices is precisely the broad experimental field for this "Chinese-style Agent" innovation driven by user demand and based on atomic restructuring as its technological cornerstone, moving towards large-scale implementation. The gears of efficiency have already accelerated, and the competitive landscape of office software may be rewritten as a result