Editor’s note: This article was written by Lucia, a TechNode reporter.
On September 21, at the Baidu AI Day open event, Baidu announced plans to accelerate the overseas expansion of their AI productivity business, alongside a global brand upgrade.
Why it matters: Baidu’s Personal Super Intelligence Group announced plans to accelerate the overseas expansion of their AI productivity business while rolling out a global brand upgrade.
Zoom in: Launched overseas last year by Baidu’s Personal Super Intelligence Group, Oreate AI has since evolved into Kooko, adding a general-purpose agent architecture, personalized memory, and tighter integration between local and cloud-based work environments. Baidu says the platform has surpassed 10 million overseas users, with paying customers in 197 countries and regions and ARR growing 50% month over month.
- Kooko combines memory, domain-specific skills, user-authorized public and private content, and Office editing in one workspace.
- The platform helps users research, analyze, and create documents, presentations, spreadsheets, and code.
- It also retains edits, preferences, and project results as context for future tasks.
The play: Baidu is positioning Kooko’s overseas strategy around localization rather than direct competition with individual AI products such as ChatGPT. Adam Wen, head of overseas business at Baidu’s Personal Super Intelligence Group, told TechNode that users in markets such as Brazil and Colombia care more about whether a product understands their context and delivers useful results at the right speed and cost than about the brand itself.
- Baidu says the AI software market is still expanding, so it is focused on making Kooko more useful across industries.
- The company is also looking at whether Kooko can help users, especially self-employed workers, generate more income.
The test bed: Baidu is using Kooko’s overseas rollout not just to expand distribution, but to learn from how users in different markets use the product. In Latin America, it is testing Kooko with large freelance and self-employed user groups, while in Europe it is observing usage patterns before turning them into new features, plugins or service packages.
- User behavior has already shaped Kooko’s development: after people began using its coding tools to build websites, Baidu put more emphasis on coding and site-building features.
- Wen said Baidu also applies the same security and privacy approach across markets.
The open question: Kooko may be able to export Baidu’s agent technology more easily than its domestic data advantage. Overseas users often keep their work on other cloud and productivity platforms, so Baidu is instead emphasizing local data, languages, workflows and user habits. Kooko’s links to local and cloud-based work environments, along with its personalized memory system, could help it build a market-specific data and context layer over time — but how effectively it can do so remains to be seen.