Baidu World 2026 Turns to the Hard Part of AI: Rewiring the Office

Baidu has sketched out the agenda for Baidu World 2026, its flagship annual showcase, with more than ten themed forums devoted to how organizations should restructure themselves around artificial intelligence. The preview, published on the company’s official account on October 21, frames enterprise AI as moving past isolated tools and single-business pilots into deeper organizational change.

The framing echoes a broader debate in China’s corporate world. Many companies have bought AI assistants for writing, customer service or coding, but fewer have redesigned teams, approval chains and job roles to match. Baidu, a search and cloud giant that has invested heavily in large language models, is positioning its conference as a place to discuss that second, harder step rather than to unveil consumer gadgets.

The forums also give Baidu a stage to sell its enterprise cloud and model services to corporate decision-makers, who are typically the ones who approve large software budgets. For global readers, the signal is that China’s AI conversation is shifting from model benchmarks toward how workplaces actually absorb the technology.

What to watch is whether the conference produces concrete customer case studies with measurable results, rather than general promises about productivity. Those details will show whether the organizational pitch is more than marketing.