Robin Li introduces intelligent organization, urging enterprise workflow reinvention

On November 12, 2026, Baidu held its Baidu World 2026 conference. Founder Robin Li said he had proposed "internalizing AI capability and building a native AI organization" at the previous year's event, and set this year's theme as "Next Act: Intelligent Organization." Li laid out three principles for an intelligent organization, describing it as the key vehicle for turning AI value into real results, requiring people and agents to work together across core business steps and embedding agents deeply into sales, customer service, R&D, and operations.

Internal figures released at the same session showed that Baidu's daily active agents, or DAA, grew from 5,000 to 37,000 within a year, an increase of more than 6x. The number of completed effective tasks handled by agents rose from an average of 84,000 per week to over 1 million per week, up 11x. Baidu has also built 4,300 Workspaces and accumulated more than 20,000 organization Skills. Li said these accumulated practices and methods can be reused more widely and made available for agents to call on.

On the gap between AI spending and returns, Li asked at the conference why Token costs keep rising while revenue and profit do not follow. He noted that some companies that emphasized Tokenmaxing at the start of the year have since turned to budget control. He compared the situation to industrial-era electrification, pointing out that early factories only swapped in electric motors without redesigning production lines, so electrification did not immediately lift productivity; companies that treat AI merely as a tool face the same limits and must redesign their organizations and business processes around AI. Li also recalled proposing at Baidu World 2016 that AI is the new electricity. He argued that the AI technology stack, built on chips, cloud infrastructure, models, and agents, has matured, while downstream organizational capability has become the new bottleneck. The discussion currently rests on this assessment and the disclosed progress of Baidu's internal transformation.