On July 17, according to Huxiu, Shen Dou, Executive Vice President of Baidu Group and President of Baidu Intelligent Cloud Business Unit, discussed his views on the application of AI and Baidu's internal practices during an interview. Shen Dou predicted that the large-scale implementation of general intelligent agents and industry-specific intelligent agents will significantly accelerate, with noticeable cases of mass deployment expected in the second half of 2026. In the future, 90% of work will involve deep participation and assistance from AI, but not complete replacement of humans.

Shen Dou believes that the next three years are a crucial window period. Within this time, AI companies and unicorns in the sector will increasingly recognize the advantages of full-stack capabilities, while competitors of Baidu Intelligent Cloud are also actively enhancing their full-stack capabilities. For Baidu Intelligent Cloud, this is both an opportunity to leverage its strengths and a challenge due to increased competition.

In promoting AI usage internally, Shen Dou clearly stated that mandating AI adoption is difficult to implement effectively. Baidu has always focused on positive guidance and incentives, without setting mandatory usage requirements. Baidu has introduced a regular employee welfare policy that is still in effect: each employee receives a monthly allowance of 1,000 yuan to freely experience various mainstream large models in the market, with no restrictions on usage purposes. This is purely to lower the barrier for employees to try out AI tools, without linking it to any work performance evaluation. His reasoning is that once employees personally experience the value of AI tools in improving efficiency, they will naturally develop a habit of regular use.

Financial data confirms the importance of AI business within Baidu. IT Home noted that in the first quarter of 2026, Baidu's AI revenue grew by 49% year-over-year, and accounted for 52% of total revenue. This is the first time in Baidu's history that AI revenue exceeded half of total revenue.

Regarding the metrics for the AI era, Shen Dou did not elaborate, but Li Yanhong, founder of Baidu, provided a clear direction at the Create 2026 Baidu AI Developer Conference in May this year. Li Yanhong proposed that the metrics for the AI era might be Daily Active Agents (DAA), corresponding to the most common metric in the mobile internet era, Daily Active Users (DAU). He pointed out that the current widely accepted metric is Token consumption, but Tokens do not necessarily represent the final state; they represent cost rather than revenue, measuring input rather than output. When humans enter the agent era, the prosperity of a platform and ecosystem should be measured more by DAA, focusing on how many agents are working for humans and delivering results. This is more aligned with value and essence compared to meaningless Token consumption.