Gu Family Home's AI Revolution: Over 8,000 AI Forms Driving Full-Chain Agile Evolution

When AI integrates into the organizational DNA, it becomes a mindset of innovation for all employees.

Leading enterprises are stepping together into a new river forged by AI.

"The era of AI experimentation is over; the era of AI reshaping business has begun," said IBM Chairman Arvind Krishna in September last year.

In the home furnishings industry, KUKa Home Co., Ltd. (hereinafter referred to as KUKa) is a pioneer of this trend. Facing dual pressures from a declining real estate market and segmented consumer demand, KUKa—established over 40 years ago—has still delivered impressive results: in the first three quarters of 2025, the company achieved an 8.77% year-on-year increase in revenue and a 13.24% rise in net profit.

Behind this sustained growth lies KUKa’s belief in "systemic strength." Its professional management team consistently emphasizes confidence in long-term competitiveness derived from systematic development rather than sporadic inspiration.

This systemic capability largely stems from KUKa's forward-looking strategy and firm investment in digital intelligence. Since forming a strategic partnership with DingTalk in 2023, KUKa has led with managerial digitization, progressively driving end-to-end digital and intelligent transformation across its entire business chain.

Taking DingTalk's AI Spreadsheet as an example, KUKa’s digital intelligence team established a full-cycle support system encompassing "training—discovery—practice—motivation." The inaugural "Digital Intelligence Tools—AI Spreadsheet" Competition, held on December 15, 2025, concluded amid applause and shared achievements. Lu Chunhong, head of digital transformation, remarked—real change has only just begun.

Within just three months, through collaboration between the management digitalization team and the business digitalization team, the company deployed over 8,000 AI spreadsheets, achieving daily active users exceeding 2,500, covering core business scenarios including R&D, sales, online operations, store management, and EHS. Meanwhile, widespread adoption of various AI tools such as KUKa Smart Messenger, iWork, and AI avatars collectively drives comprehensive intelligent transformation across KUKa’s operations.

KUKa’s digital intelligence team pointed out: “Tools like DingTalk’s AI Spreadsheet enable seamless vertical integration from management to frontline operations. Everyone is actively embracing change and continuously unleashing innovative energy.”

Since launching promotion efforts in August 2025, DingTalk’s AI Spreadsheet has rapidly grown within KUKa, accumulating over 8,000 created sheets and being widely applied across diverse business scenarios.

This AI tool has not only won multiple awards in internal AI innovation contests but also penetrated frontline manufacturing, bridging three core segments—"online operations—store sales—manufacturing"—becoming a key AI engine supporting KUKa’s "front-store-back-factory" fast-response model.

Retail is one of the first areas where AI spreadsheets were implemented.

As a leader in omnichannel home furnishings, KUKa operates nearly ten official flagship stores across major e-commerce platforms, managing tens of thousands of product listings annually.

Previously, channel operators spent about half an hour per product listing, and during peak promotional periods, this could extend to over ten hours. Given the involvement of multiple departments such as planning, marketing, and channels, errors were inevitable, negatively affecting user experience and increasing operational costs.

To address this pain point, KUKa built a digital closed loop using "iWork + RPA + AI Spreadsheet." Now, operators simply input product information into the header and click execute to complete listing. This approach saves labor costs, reduces new employee training time from one week to one hour, and has operated error-free since implementation.

The empowerment of AI tools extends far beyond e-commerce. Today, more and more workflows at KUKa are being restructured by DingTalk’s AI Spreadsheet.

In live-streaming ad budget management, headquarters and regional staff use AI tools to efficiently manage budgets, freeing themselves from tedious manual data aggregation and reconciliation tasks while avoiding statistical errors. More importantly, AI spreadsheets break down data silos, connecting data across reporting,投放, settlement, and conversion processes, enabling精细化 budget and settlement management and directly boosting ROI.

Offline stores are also being revitalized by AI tools.

Previously, materials and training content related to new product launches involved coordination among multiple departments including product planning, operations, packaging, and training. As some steps relied on manual communication, information delays and missed deadlines often occurred, leading to awkward situations such as "products arrived at stores before sales scripts were ready," directly impacting customer experience.

Now, AI spreadsheets automatically send task reminders to responsible individuals, virtually eliminating scheduling delays. "In the past, about half of related training couldn't be completed on time when launching new products in stores; now, most training is fully completed by the time new products arrive."

In production, AI spreadsheets also demonstrate strong potential.

Sofas are KUKa’s flagship category, involving over a thousand production steps and more than 70 personnel.

Project manager Wang Weiping quickly adopted AI spreadsheets into production scheduling after attending a company-wide AI spreadsheet webinar. She noted that previously, tracking production progress required not only business systems but also reliance on DingTalk groups or phone calls, which was inefficient. "@Someone in a group chat means scrolling endlessly; each call averages five minutes," she said, frequently falling into cycles of "waiting—chasing—repeating communication." This management style focused primarily on outcome achievement, leaving room for improvement in process monitoring and detail control.

With AI spreadsheets, she established a comprehensive pathway connecting "customer service—frontline execution—management decision-making," breaking down interdepartmental communication barriers and upgrading manual scheduling to an efficient, precise intelligent closed loop, significantly enhancing organizational agility and decision efficiency.

Take the sofa frame manufacturing stage as an example. After reform, the production cycle was refined and compressed from a rough estimate of two working days to 1.5 days. In practice, it can even be shortened to approximately 0.5 working days, allowing the company to achieve new breakthroughs on top of already industry-leading efficiency.

Internal estimates indicate that AI spreadsheets improve work efficiency for hundreds of employees monthly, resulting in substantial cumulative cost savings.

Currently, the value of AI tools in reducing costs and improving efficiency has become a shared understanding across KUKa. However, their rollout was not immediate. For AI spreadsheets, KUKa adopted a pragmatic promotion strategy in the initial phase.

"We needed to assess whether they genuinely drive business without adding burdens to employees; ensure alignment with employee perceptions to avoid resistance; and evaluate product sustainability and alignment with trends," said AI Spreadsheet Enablement Expert Wang Yang.

During the pilot phase, the company did not enforce mandatory adoption but encouraged interested employees and departments to start small, exploring solutions based on actual business pain points, then sharing successful cases internally to spark interest.

Additionally, starting from late August 2025, the company conducted over ten dedicated AI spreadsheet webinars, attracting nearly 5,000 participants in total. These sessions adhered to principles of "voluntary participation and open learning," focusing on the value proposition of "AI tools solving business pain points," encouraging autonomous interaction and Q&A. Some employees proactively recommended the tool to other departments after trying it, creating cross-departmental organic diffusion. For instance, Wang Weiping reached out to the digital team after attending a webinar, initiating the restructuring of production scheduling.

On the basis of broadly aligning around the idea that "AI spreadsheets hold great potential," in December 2025, KUKa hosted a company-wide, barrier-free AI Spreadsheet Competition final judged jointly by senior executives from both KUKa and DingTalk. The competition outcomes further accelerated the spread and application of AI spreadsheets. For example, the winning project on production scheduling attracted proactive engagement from upstream and downstream departments, elevating AI spreadsheets from isolated improvements to cross-departmental collaboration, truly transforming one scenario into a cascade of optimized processes and supply chains.

KUKa places great emphasis on aligning corporate value with individual benefits when applying and designing AI tools,

Fu Qidong from the Retail Capability Development Department deeply understands this.

Fu stated that task omissions are common in offline store management across the industry. However, after six months of using AI spreadsheets, the number of supervisors receiving negative scores due to missed tasks has steadily decreased.

Point-to-point task push via iWork combined with AI spreadsheets ensures clear accountability and transparent evidence, reducing employee complaints and even prompting proactive cooperation. Furthermore, one-click operations greatly lower usage barriers, enabling frontline sales staff and factory workers—with limited digital literacy—to easily adopt the tools.

At KUKa, AI spreadsheets have transcended mere functionality to become a habitual mindset—"Can this task be efficiently solved with AI?" From frontline employees to professional managers, the company embraces an AI-driven mindset, actively identifying and resolving business challenges.

This shift not only enhances efficiency across the entire value chain but also transforms work patterns from passive response to proactive collaboration, from isolated improvements to systemic synergy. Indeed, AI has become an organization-wide thinking framework, steering the enterprise toward greater intelligence and collaboration.

KUKa’s achievements in AI stem from treating digital intelligence as the core lever for strategic transformation.

To KUKa, a good tool is more than just software—it represents an advanced work philosophy whose value lies in "helping shape better management thinking, building robust management systems, ultimately serving business needs and supporting long-term growth."

Guided by this vision, KUKa maintained strategic confidence and tactical flexibility in promoting AI tools like DingTalk’s AI Spreadsheet, achieving widespread adoption and establishing a positive cycle of "business pain point driven → employee-led innovation → management endorsement → full-chain rollout."

With early successes evident, in 2026 KUKa will continue its path of "business integration, pain-point driven" initiatives, focusing on core areas such as e-commerce, store management, supply chain, and production R&D, deepening both the breadth and depth of AI spreadsheet applications, moving from "functional trials" to "deep business integration."

In terms of rollout strategy, the company will continue hosting webinars to popularize AI spreadsheets and align employee understanding, complemented by performance incentives linked to recognition ("red events") and penalties ("black events"), pushing AI spreadsheets to cover all employees, all product lines, and all bases, significantly boosting workforce efficiency. In value assessment, the company looks beyond time saved, emphasizing redirecting freed human resources to high-value areas such as customer experience enhancement and improved live-streaming ad performance to generate greater overall value.

Currently, AI spreadsheets have deeply penetrated KUKa’s full business chain—including production, R&D, design, e-commerce, stores, and distribution—becoming a critical enabler for cost reduction and efficiency gains in both manufacturing and retail environments.

Likewise, DingTalk’s AI Spreadsheet is widely used by other industry leaders such as Muyuan Group, Semir, Mengniu, CATL, Intime Retail, and Meinian Onehealth, demonstrating broad cross-industry adaptability.

In manufacturing, China possesses the world’s most comprehensive industrial system, forming a solid foundation for 'Made in China,' while deeper AI integration is accelerating the transition toward 'Intelligent Made in China.'

In January 2025, eight government departments including the Ministry of Industry and Information Technology jointly issued the *Implementation Guidelines for the 'AI + Manufacturing' Initiative*, aiming to advance China’s core AI technologies and industrial impact to global leadership by 2027.

As an advocate of "workstyles for the AI era," DingTalk continues lowering the barrier to AI adoption. Its AI Spreadsheet integrates capabilities such as visual recognition, multimodal processing, and large language models, launching over 20 new AI features in mid-December last year.

For example, two recently introduced functions—“Universal Paste” and “Just Say It”—allow users to leverage AI to extract unstructured data—from a screenshot to a voice note—and automatically convert it into structured table entries, effectively reducing the usage threshold to nearly zero.

Lowering these barriers means AI is becoming accessible productivity for every enterprise. As demonstrated by industry leaders like KUKa, when AI permeates the organizational bloodstream, even large-scale enterprises can achieve agile evolution and sustained leadership.

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