Baidu’s Robin Li says AI’s next phase is the “intelligent organization,” outlines three principles

Baidu founder Robin Li said Thursday that the next stage of AI adoption will require companies to redesign how they work. Speaking at Baidu World 2026 in Beijing, he laid out three principles for what he calls an “intelligent organization”: organize work around tasks that cross job boundaries, document employee know-how so teams and AI agents can reuse it, and measure the results of each workflow so it can be improved over time.

Li said jobs would increasingly fall into two broad groups. He described “builders” as people who create products or services and “sellers” as people whose work depends on communication and trust. The distinction was part of his argument that companies could assign work by task as AI takes on more steps across teams.

Li pointed to Baidu’s own operations as an early example. Over the past year, the number of AI agents active daily inside the company rose from about 5,000 to 37,000, while the number of tasks they completed each week increased from 84,000 to more than 1 million, according to Baidu. [TechNode reporting]