https://x.com/i/article/2094277556052914176
AI Productivity: Let's Get Down to "Business"
Welcome to the August issue of AI Pulse. This month, we're looking at a bigger shift underway in AI productivity: where it's heading, and what that actually means for the people using these tools every day.
No doubt, the demand is real. McKinsey's latest global AI survey found that 88% of organizations now report regular AI use in at least one business function, up from 78% just a year ago, and more than two-thirds now use AI in more than one function. This surging demand is even more pronounced in China's office market than almost anywhere else right now. Enterprise AI agent adoption there rose from roughly 17% at the end of 2024 to over 40% by mid-2026, according to industry estimates.
But for most people, the workday still feels scattered across apps and tasks. Context gets lost between sessions. The AI you used yesterday doesn't remember what you were working on, let alone why it mattered. We've noticed that experience gap, and believe what AI productivity tools today need is a fundamental shift toward a single, connected workflow, one that brings together model capability, desktop-level execution, enterprise data, and organizational collaboration, instead of treating each as a separate tool.
This issue looks at how we're working toward that, through the lens of our latest AI productivity lineup: DuMate, GenFlow, Miaoda & MeDo, and ERNIE Assistant.
DuMate: Seamless Enterprise AI Productivity Built to Deliver, MAU Up Over 1,000% in a Month
People need AI to brainstorm, but more often, they need AI to just get things done. Imagine it's 11 p.m. You've got the idea that finally clicked. The idea took five minutes. But building it, editing it and publishing it is what eats the rest of the night.
DuMate is built to close that gap: a general-purpose AI agent, built for everyday productivity and autonomous execution of complex, multi-step tasks. We introduced DuMate in March 2026, followed by an enterprise edition in July 2026.
This month, we've rolled out DuMate's biggest update to date, aimed at professional and enterprise work. The idea behind this update is simple: less switching between tools, less rework, and a more seamless experience between human and AI.
This new update brings together upgrades across personal and enterprise offerings, professional suites, and workspaces, including 15 suites and 96 specialized skills spanning finance and accounting, business and legal, product and R&D, and operations and HR, along with more end-to-end support for content creation, financial analysis, industry research, and more, plus integration with Miaoda for app development.
Now, publishing a creative idea or shipping an app takes a fraction of the time it used to. Need to create content for social media? DuMate's content creation suite takes you from topic research to content ideation, and all the way through to multi-platform publishing and performance review, covering text, images, and video. And if all you want off your plate is the tedious part, like editing or subtitle syncing, you can call on that skill on its own too.
Output formats got broader too. Beyond documents, DuMate can now produce PowerPoints, data reports, webpages, posters, graphics, and video. PowerPoints can match the style of a file you already have, pull from a template library for something quick, or be built from scratch, structure and visual design included.
Underpinning all of this is Harness Engine, DuMate's execution engine, responsible for planning tasks, calling the right tools, and carrying a job through to completion. In testing, Harness Engine completed tasks at a rate above 99%, while cutting resource consumption by 30%.
The growth behind all this has been hard to ignore. DuMate's monthly active users reached 6.74 million, up more than 1,063% month over month, ranking as the fastest-growing AI agent on AICPB's July list. And there's still plenty of room to grow: desktop AI office tools in China have around 30 million monthly active users today, compared to the far larger base of traditional office software, suggesting the market could still grow as much as 20-fold from here.
GenFlow: From General AI Agent to Professional AI Agent, with AI Productivity Functions Now Crossing 25 Million MAUs
Most AI productivity tools are built to generate. Ask for a document, and you'll get one. But generating isn't the hard part, collecting trustworthy information for the AI to generate from is. Most tools have no real knowledge base behind them, so the burden falls back on the user: gathering files, pulling data, tracking down context, before the AI can even start.
That's why we built GenFlow, a general AI agent built on top of Baidu Drive and Baidu Wenku. Instead of asking users to feed context into the AI, it works directly inside the data people already have: files in Drive, and more than a decade of professional content in Wenku. A file generated today automatically becomes context for tomorrow's task, giving GenFlow something most AI tools are short of: a trustworthy knowledge base to draw on, rather than a blank slate. By April 2026, that foundation had already helped GenFlow cross 100 million MAUs. And as of August 2026, its workplace AI tools have reached 25 million MAUs.
This month, GenFlow was upgraded again and given a new Chinese name: Kuku AI. The upgrade introduced a three-tier system: a standard tier that carries GenFlow's existing general-purpose capabilities, a new professional tier aimed at fields like finance, and an enterprise tier built for teams and organizations.
For individual professionals, this shows up concretely. GenFlow's first professional vertical is finance, a field with little tolerance for generic answers. Users get direct access to financial reports, research, and trading data with traceable sourcing, plus built-in expert roles like equity researcher and investment analyst. Tasks also carry across devices: start on a laptop, close it, and pick up later from a phone.
For enterprises, the focus shifts to institutional memory. The enterprise tier is built around shared context and task handoff across a team, so that knowledge accumulates. Early results: event photo processing that once took a full day now runs in minutes, and short-form video localization has gone from about a week to under half an hour.
MeDo and Miaoda: From Building Apps to Delivering Business
AI productivity tools like DuMate and GenFlow handle the broad range of everyday work. But some tasks call for something more specialized. Building an app is one of them, and that's the vertical MeDo, known as Miaoda in China, our no-code development platform, is built for.
The 3.5 version transitions MeDo from single-app generation to full business delivery. A single backend can now power multiple connected touchpoints at once. Take e-commerce, for example, the backend can connect customer-facing storefronts, merchant order systems, marketing channels, and SEO optimization function, so the app you produce isn't just a standalone page, but a working business system.
This shift toward full delivery matters most for one group in particular: the growing number of people running an entire business on their own, the OPC (One-person Company) model taking hold worldwide. For these users, MeDo's idea-to-business pipeline is what makes running a company of one actually practical.
MeDo is open to builders everywhere at medo.dev.
ERNIE Assistant: Lightweight Productivity at Your Fingertips
Not every task needs a dedicated workspace on a laptop. Sometimes it's a quick question between meetings, or a concept you need explained on the spot. That's the gap ERNIE Assistant fills. It is the handy AI experience built into Baidu App, a household application opened by millions of people every day for search, news, and small tasks.
The upgraded ERNIE Assistant now takes a task from start to finish rather than just answering a question along the way, light enough to live in your pocket. Usage shows it: daily active users were up 83% year over year in June. The latest upgrade adds more than 400 professional skills across over 30 industries, carrying a task from initial research to a finished deliverable, right from your phone.
Search is getting the same treatment. A complex question to ERNIE Assistant now returns a fully interactive page, combining knowledge cards, step-by-step visuals, and animations you can operate directly, ideal for a student trying to visualize a hard concept instead of just reading about it.
Apollo Go Goes Global: 28 Cities, 23 Million Rides and Counting
• Apollo Go kept advancing its global expansion in Q2 2026, with its footprint now covering 28 cities from the Middle East to Europe and across Asia and accumulating over 23 million rides in Q2 2026.
• Our fully driverless vehicles now average one airbag deployment every 14.4 million kilometers as of the end of June, some of the best safety numbers in the industry. We also made pickups and drop-offs smarter, and kept refining how our vehicles perceive and plan around the road for a smoother ride.
Apollo Go Now Available on Uber Platform in Dubai
• We brought Apollo Go's autonomous vehicles onto the Uber app, giving riders in Dubai a new way to book a ride in addition to Baidu's proprietary Apollo Go app.
• Riders booking UberX or Uber Comfort in Umm Suqeim and Jumeirah now have a chance of being matched with an Apollo Go vehicle, or can select "Autonomous" to increase their odds.
• This marks our first integration into Uber's app, building on our broader push into Dubai's mobility market.
Apollo Go Links Hong Kong's High-Speed Rail and Airport Express
• We began testing our first autonomous vehicle route in West Kowloon, Hong Kong, supporting a project led by MTR Corporation and Airport Authority Hong Kong.
• The route connects Hong Kong West Kowloon Station, the terminus for high-speed rail service to mainland China, with Kowloon Station, a stop on the Airport Express.
• We're helping explore a seamless transfer solution for passengers moving between the two stations, part of a broader push toward integrated rail-air connectivity in Hong Kong.
Baidu Becomes Dual-Primary Listed on Hong Kong Stock Exchange
• Starting September 1, 2026, Baidu is converting from a secondary listing to a primary listing on the Hong Kong Stock Exchange, making the company dual-primary listed both in Hong Kong and on the Nasdaq Global Select Market.
• Read more.
Q2 2026 Earnings: AI-Powered Business Holds Steady at 50%
• We announced our Q2 2026 earnings results, with AI-Powered Business remaining our core as its revenue accounted for 50% of General Business revenue for a second consecutive quarter, driven by strong momentum in AI Cloud Infra and continued growth in AI Applications' capabilities and use cases.
• Read more.
Our Dubai launch with Uber drew coverage across The National, Gulf News, and Khaleej Times.
Separately, Lyft CEO David Risher also spoke about our global partnership, now already underway with testing in London, in a recent interview with The Information, addressing strategic logic head-on:
We've decided to work very, very closely and deeply with the people we believe are the world's leaders in AV...This would be a Waymo in the United States, Baidu which is a Chinese company and we're working with them in London...We feel very, very strongly that the best way to sort of enter this market is in deep partnership with a small number of true leaders and create something that is, frankly, new and where the whole is greater than the sum of the parts.
DuMate's growth also caught outside attention. Pandaily reported that China's AI office desktop market reached 30 million total monthly active users in July 2026, with DuMate posting the fastest growth in the category at 1,063%. TechNode covered the launch of DuMateBench, our new open evaluation leaderboard with more than 200 real office tasks, describing it as shifting the focus "from what an AI model can answer to what it can complete and deliver."
Have a question about Baidu's latest developments, or something you'd love us to cover next? Leave a comment or DM us!
Until our next roundup, keep up with our latest AI developments and innovations by following us on LinkedIn and X.