Baidu founder Robin Li proposed changing how companies organize work at Baidu World in China. His plan brings tasks across job boundaries, makes employees’ practical knowledge reusable and arranges workflows around completed work. The speech concerns sales, customer service, development and operations, with shared skills forming part of the proposed organization.
Robin Li, founder of Chinese technology company Baidu, used his November 12 Baidu World address to call for a different organization of work around AI agents. He proposed allowing tasks to cross job boundaries, capturing employees’ practical knowledge and arranging workflows around completed work. The proposal covers sales, customer service, research and development, and operations rather than a single department.[1], [2]
In Li’s account, knowledge that stays with an individual team can become a reusable capability for colleagues and agents. He described shared skills as accumulated working methods available beyond the people who originally developed them. The accompanying organizational principles call for loosening fixed roles and designing a path through the whole task, so that work can proceed across existing boundaries.[1], [2]
Li argued that greater model spending alone does not automatically bring a company more revenue or profit. His speech instead places organizational capability after the infrastructure, models and agents a business adopts. He also suggested that future roles could center on creating new things and building communication and trust between people. Those ideas were presented as his forecast about work, alongside the proposed workflow changes.[1]
