AI Is All the Rage Outside—But Village Group Chats Are in Chaos
During the National Day holiday, I returned to my rural hometown to help the village cooperative manage its autumn harvest accounts.
As I stepped off the high-speed train, my phone kept buzzing with colleagues’ discussions about AI and intelligent work agents. Yet the moment I entered the village committee’s office—its walls peeling and worn—I was greeted by an old-fashioned loudspeaker mounted on the wall and the village chief’s smartphone, its screen corner cracked.
While city dwellers celebrate, group chats in the village descend into utter chaos.
To coordinate farm machinery dispatch, the village chief sent a lengthy voice message across several WeChat groups—each with over one hundred members. Within two minutes, the screen flooded with emoticons favored by middle-aged and elderly users, misspelled “Received” replies, and casual small talk. Everyone had long grown accustomed to this haphazard communication style—and no one thought anything of it.
He sighed, tossing his phone onto the desk: “I have to call each person individually just to confirm they’ve seen a notice—I’m practically going cross-eyed.”
Watching the red indentations left on his nose bridge by his reading glasses, I felt a pang of discomfort. In big cities, we assume AI is everywhere—but across China’s vast townships and villages, technology often remains voiceless.
This isn’t because grassroots communities resist new tools. Rather, those flashy solutions simply fail to address their most urgent pain points. They don’t need poetry-writing robots or systems that auto-generate dazzling reports. What they truly need is a platform that delivers notifications precisely—and makes shift scheduling crystal clear.
In fact, even introducing something as fundamental as Lark—a basic collaboration platform—would be enough to handle daily operations. Simply organizing instant messaging, documents, calendars, and approvals—the kinds of capabilities considered standard in modern workplaces—would suffice. No complexity required: create a meeting agenda in the calendar right after the meeting ends; log tractor operator information in a multi-dimensional table—that’s all it takes.
Bringing technology down to the grassroots level has never meant transplanting lofty, abstract concepts wholesale. It means bending down, listening closely to the local dialect echoing from the loudspeaker, and untangling the genuine needs buried beneath an avalanche of scrolling messages.
Grassroots Communities Aren’t Afraid of New Technology—They Fear “Fake Innovation” That Solves Nothing Real
During Spring Festival last year, I tried teaching my father how to use a so-called “all-in-one” software application—complex and overloaded with features. The result was disastrous. He stared blankly at the screen cluttered with icons and deeply nested menus, shaking his head: “This thing? Doesn’t even compare to the loudspeaker at the village entrance.” For older generations, learning cost is the biggest barrier.
Yet moments later, I witnessed something entirely different: a large-scale contracted farmer operating an agricultural drone to spray pesticides over wheat fields with practiced ease. At just dozens of yuan per mu and completed in minutes, no one cared about the sophisticated algorithms behind it—they only cared about two things: no trampling of crops, and significant labor savings.
Grassroots communities aren’t afraid of new technology—they fear “fake innovation” that fails to solve real problems.
During the days I spent assisting at the village committee, I saw firsthand what grassroots collaboration truly looks like. Flood-control supplies were tracked using a crumpled, handwritten sheet—ink often blurred by sweat. Forest rangers’ shifts were scheduled via hundreds of voice messages flooding group chats; missing just one could mean missing an early fire alert.
Those digital concepts repeatedly polished and repackaged in urban office buildings feel utterly out of place here. They don’t need complex permission models or flashy data dashboards—just a simple, reliable way to clarify responsibilities and get things done.
Deploying a foundational collaboration platform like Lark—with its everyday, commonsense capabilities—is enough to untie these knots. Use instant messaging to push urgent notices directly to individuals, cutting through the noise of idle chatter. Use multi-dimensional tables to organize inventory logs and duty rosters—so everyone knows instantly who’s on duty when, and where each batch of sandbags is stored. Even basic document sharing and approval workflows become valuable tools if they eliminate just two trips to the township office—or spare someone from filling out two redundant forms.
The true meaning of bringing technology down to the grassroots isn’t dressing up frontline work in glamorous digital attire. It’s using the most straightforward, dependable functions to support the relentless, day-in-day-out grind. For this land, a tool that saves time—time to walk one more lap through the fields—is good technology.
Using Commonsense Capabilities to Carry the Real Weight of Grassroots Work
I often tell my cousin—who serves as a village cadre back home—not to keep coveting those flashy data dashboards seen in cities. What grassroots teams actually need are practical tools that bring order to daily chaos.
Take shift scheduling during autumn harvest or flood prevention. In the past, my cousin relied solely on memory—or jotted notes in a tattered notebook. Who missed a shift? Who covered for whom? It was always a messy, uncertain ledger. Now, with Lark Calendar, everything becomes transparent: who patrols the levees on which day, who oversees which orchard—just pull up the timeline, and everyone sees it clearly.
Then there are the perennially mismatched agricultural input records and flood-control inventories. Build a master table using multi-dimensional tables: how much fertilizer arrived? Which warehouse holds which batch of sandbags? Update anytime—no more frantic, all-night spreadsheet revisions before inspections arrive.
Grassroots teams aren’t afraid of tools—they’re afraid of tools that aren’t grounded in reality.
Lark’s instant messaging and approval workflows often prove the most immediately relieving. Urgent notices reach recipients precisely, without getting lost in chatter. Requesting official seals takes just a few taps on a mobile device—no more riding an electric scooter to the township office for stamps.
What moved me most, however, was the transformation brought by Lark’s open ecosystem. My cousin’s generation types slowly and finds drafting official documents especially daunting. But within Lark groups, integrated third-party AI assistants have become their “ghostwriters.” When my cousin sends a few plain-spoken reminders in the group chat, the AI assistant helps draft a clear, well-structured flood-prevention notice.
Sometimes villagers post 30-second voice messages venting frustrations. Intelligent work agents instantly summarize core requests—eliminating the need to replay those recordings three or four times while squinting through reading glasses. Their eyes—and their energy—simply can’t take that kind of strain.
No complicated configuration. No coding knowledge required. These commonsense capabilities—paired with intelligent work agents from the ecosystem—have quietly woven themselves into daily village life.
Good technology has never been about looking down from above. Instead, it becomes an invisible pair of hands—steadily holding up the mundane, weighty realities rooted in soil and sweat.
Stop Overengineering Systems—Start Working Where Real Life Happens
On the high-speed train back to the city, watching farmland blur past the window, I felt an unspoken sense of calm. This trip home didn’t deliver sci-fi cyberpunk visions—but it did show me what technology *should* look like.
China’s urban tech circles endlessly chase the flashiest specs and largest models. Conference presentations dazzle with sleek PPTs; grand concepts fill keynote speeches. Yet return to that village where residents still travel to the township to collect packages—and those high-flying terms vanish like mist before an autumn breeze.
The village’s longtime Party branch secretary once complained to me: “Before, filling out a single form meant jumping between multiple group chats until my eyes were sore.” They don’t need virtual idols capable of writing poetry or painting masterpieces. They just need a tool that reliably delivers flood-prevention alerts to every villager’s phone—even during torrential rain.
Lark—and the third-party intelligent work agents integrated into its ecosystem—function like a team of “silent helpers.” No flashy packaging. Just solid, foundational capabilities—instant messaging, documents, approvals, calendars—firmly planted in the soil of everyday life. Paired with AI-powered office tools already connected through the ecosystem, they help village cadres maintain accurate records—and help farmers track planting schedules. Life is lived day by day—not inflated by hype.
Only when technology stops performing for show does it finally acquire warmth.
We often speak of “technology for good.” But true goodness doesn’t mean stuffing cutting-edge computing power into expensive toys. It means ensuring even remote, information-isolated, and operationally rough-hewn corners can equitably benefit from digitalization. It means helping those left behind by the express train of progress catch their breath—even if only by eliminating one trip to the township office, or sparing one all-nighter.
Stop overengineering systems—start working where real life happens.
When code and intelligent assistants truly step into the fields—into the routines soaked with morning dew and hard-earned sweat—we’ll know, at last, that we haven’t betrayed this roaring, transformative digital era.