"Embracing AI is not a choice, but something Tongrentang must do well to face the future."
"Embracing AI is not a choice, but a mission Tongrentang must fulfill for the future."
Recently, the launch ceremony of the first Tongrentang (Group) Co., Ltd. AI Pioneer Competition was held in Beijing. Di Shubing, Deputy Party Secretary and General Manager of Tongrentang Group, attended the event together with core members of the Feishu team. Following the ceremony, both parties conducted a signing agreement.
Founded in 1669, Tongrentang is among the first batch of "China Time-honored Brands," and "Tongrentang Traditional Chinese Medicine Culture" has been included in the national list of representative intangible cultural heritage projects. After 357 years of development, Tongrentang has established an industrial ecosystem covering pharmaceutical manufacturing, health preservation, medical care and elderly services, commercial retail, and international pharmaceuticals.
Facing the new wave of artificial intelligence, this centuries-old enterprise is partnering with Feishu to make AI an everyday tool readily accessible to all employees—"employee-driven, AI-assisted, carrying forward 357 years of high-quality experience into the next chapter."
"Embracing AI is not a choice, but something Tongrentang must do well to face the future," said Di Shubing, Deputy Party Secretary and General Manager of Tongrentang Group, pointing out that promoting AI adoption is not only about keeping pace with technological transformation but also represents a crucial opportunity for traditional brands to transform and grow.
Tongrentang’s brand foundation built over more than three centuries, along with its enduring culture, craftsmanship, and business wisdom, are the company’s most valuable assets. The enterprise must leverage digitalization and AI to preserve and extend these experiences, transforming them into driving forces for innovation in production, operations, and service delivery.
Di Shubing, Deputy Party Secretary and General Manager of Tongrentang Group
The competition, themed “Wisdom Ignites Centuries: AI Empowers Tongrentang,” is jointly organized by Tongrentang Group’s IT team, Youth League Committee, and Feishu. Upholding the principle of “competition as training, competition driving application,” it focuses on three core business areas—marketing, production, and retail stores—and follows a “10+M+N” framework to promote AI use cases: including high-value scenarios designated from the top down, as well as encouraging employees to identify pain points from the bottom up.
Prior to the event, Tongrentang collaborated with Feishu to conduct Douna workshops, offering training and co-creation sessions to help employees explore practical applications of Feishu and Douna based on real business challenges, accumulating nearly 100 AI implementation cases. At the launch meeting, five frontline employees presented representative outcomes.
An employee from the Group's General Office spent three weeks building an information reporting system covering 18 departments and 59 secondary and tertiary units, digitizing the entire process of submission, review, notification, and statistics; an employee from Datong Pharmaceutical Factory in Daxing developed a visit and sales data management system, consolidating scattered visit and retail data and reducing query time from several hours to within minutes; the Research Institute introduced AI applications in training question generation, electronic signatures, and deviation management, making quality management processes more standardized and traceable; Langfang Pharmacy developed an intelligent replenishment calculation tool, reducing order processing time from one to three hours down to minutes, achieving over 95% accuracy in pilot tests; Dashilar Pharmacy constructed a knowledge graph for proprietary Chinese medicines, converting 733 products and 607 herbal ingredients into 3,129 nodes and nearly 16,000 relationships, enabling rapid querying and utilization of fragmented product knowledge.
Di Shubing encouraged leaders across units to elevate their perspective, lead by example, and closely integrate competition preparation with daily work, promoting cross-departmental and cross-unit sharing and reuse of successful outcomes. “As long as you solve real problems and create real value in your role, you are the AI pioneer Tongrentang needs.”
Scene from the Tongrentang Group AI Pioneer Competition Launch Ceremony
This launch event marks the official kick-off of Tongrentang’s first AI Pioneer Competition. Going forward, the competition will drive AI adoption from isolated employee initiatives toward widespread practical application across roles and functions. In the future, Tongrentang will continue collaborating with Feishu to explore deeper AI applications in production, quality control, marketing, store operations, and organizational management, ensuring that centuries of accumulated expertise is better preserved and passed on in the digital era, injecting new organizational momentum into the innovation and heritage of traditional Chinese medicine brands.