Baidu Says 37,000 AI Agents Now Work Inside the Company Every Day, Up Sixfold in a Year

Plenty of companies are still debating whether to let staff use AI. Baidu just shared an internal number instead: about 37,000 AI agents now "show up for work" at the company every day.

What happened

Baidu World 2026 opened in Beijing on the morning of Nov. 12. According to Yicai, citing Securities Times, Baidu founder Robin Li said in his keynote that a year ago he had called for "internalizing AI capabilities and building an AI-native organization." Since then, Baidu's daily active agents, a metric he called DAA, have grown from an average of 5,000 a day to 37,000, more than a sixfold jump. Tasks completed by those agents rose from about 84,000 a week to more than 1 million a week, an 11-fold increase. Baidu has set up 4,300 internal workspaces and built up more than 20,000 reusable organizational "skills."

Li also argued that AI's next act is the "intelligent organization." According to National Business Daily, he said that if AI is the new electricity, the intelligent organization is the AI era's new factory floor, the place where productivity actually happens. He said jobs won't disappear but will "converge" into roughly two kinds: builders, who create new things, and sellers, who handle communication and connection between people and build emotional trust.

A few terms, explained

AI agent: not just a chatbot, but an AI program that takes a task, breaks it into steps, uses tools and gets it done, such as drafting a weekly report, pulling data, fixing code or handling a support ticket.

DAA: think of the "daily active users" figure apps brag about, except it counts AI agents actually doing work each day.

Skill: an employee's know-how for doing something well, written down as steps and rules an AI can follow. In Li's words, it turns one person's experience into the whole organization's capability.

Why it matters

For the past two years, big tech companies have mostly talked about AI in terms of how powerful their models are. Baidu instead showed a growth curve for real AI use inside its own company, with task volume up 11 times in a year. It suggests that at some tech firms, AI has gone from a chat window employees open now and then to a large fleet of "digital coworkers" running every day.

There are limits. These are Baidu's own figures and haven't been independently checked. The keynote didn't define an "effective task," say how big tasks are, or say how much human work they replace. One agent isn't one employee, so 37,000 agents can't be compared directly with Baidu's headcount.

What it means for you

If this spreads through big companies, the most immediate change is that more repetitive office work, like organizing files, filling in forms, writing first drafts and looking up data, will be handed to AI. By Li's account, jobs won't simply vanish, but they will change: you'll either be good at making new things or good at working with people and earning their trust. For office workers, knowing how to "teach" AI your own know-how and work alongside it may become a basic skill.

Original sources published: National Business Daily, Nov. 12, 2026, 09:54 Beijing time (UTC+8); ifeng.com (via National Business Daily), Nov. 12, 2026, 09:58 Beijing time; Yicai, Nov. 12, 2026, 10:04 Beijing time