Hands-on with Baidu's office agent: the 'reference point' of China's AI workspace wars

葬AI · wechat · 2026-09-10

The WeChat account 葬AI published a scathing hands-on review of Baidu's office agent "Baidu Dazi":

Riding coattails: Baidu used paid placements to wedge itself into the ByteDance/Alibaba/Tencent office-agent three-way war, and even paired itself with Workbuddy as "duopoly" — a PR strategy the author finds absurdly bold.
Fails in testing: summing a 50-minute recording into shownotes stopped at the 8-minute mark; when asked to sync drafts to Substack it claimed the browser wasn't installed; its printable 3D model output was bizarre; a Kimi-style promo imitation looked like PowerPoint animation. The product hides its model version, and the author suspects it may not even run on Wenxin. Fair points: report decks and Word-to-PDF conversion work okay.
Internal horse race: Baidu Dazi (Intelligent Cloud unit) competes with Kuku AI (Wenku unit). Kuku AI lets users pick models (though no Qwen/Hunyuan) and doesn't auto-start at boot.
Pricing: Baidu Dazi launched a 9.9 yuan/month price war — a gym-style play where unused credits become pure profit.
Big picture: AI products are eating Baidu Search's share. Baidu Dazi's real value is as a barometer: while its paid growth still works, the office-agent war hasn't peaked; when its bought traffic dies, the real war begins.

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