On Wednesday, the Create 2026 Baidu AI Developer Conference, themed Agents at Scale, opened in Beijing. During the opening ceremony, Robin Li, founder of Baidu, delivered a keynote speech centered on self-evolution, which he described as a defining theme of the AI era. The company also unveiled several AI products focused on intelligent agents and enterprise applications.
Robin Li outlined the shift in AI from large model competition to AI agent competition, noting that intelligent agents are becoming the central focus of the next phase of the AI industry.
Li said that over the past few years, the key breakthroughs in the AI industry have largely come from improvements in foundation model capabilities. However, the logic behind breakout AI products has shifted this year. “For the first time, what really made AI go viral was not the model, but the application,” he said.
The AI products currently gaining attention are not dependent on a single specific model, but are instead built on top of models as agent systems that can stay online continuously and carry out tasks over time, according to Li.
In his view, this signals a shift in the AI industry from competing on model scale and capability to competing on task execution. What users are willing to pay for is no longer whether AI can think or not, but whether it can get things done, he said. AI is evolving from chatbots into digital workers, task agents, and autonomous collaborative systems capable of calling tools, breaking down tasks, and executing workflows.
