In 2024, the two most important female executives of Baidu | Focus Analysis
Written by Zhou Xinyu
Edited by Su Jianxun
After holding the annual significant event "Baidu World Conference" and releasing the third-quarter financial report - Baidu, one of the most crucial AI giants in China, has basically completed the business assessment for the entire year of 2024.
Judging solely from the financial report, AI has not added much luster to Baidu's main business. In this quarter, Baidu's total revenue was 33.6 billion yuan, and the online marketing revenue, as the "cash cow", was 18.8 billion yuan, both showing a year-on-year decline.
However, in 2024, Baidu's AI business is not without highlights. We believe that if you want to understand Baidu's AI business this year, it might be helpful to take the two most highly regarded female executives as a coordinate system.
The first is Wang Ying, Vice President of Baidu and Head of the Wenku Business Division. Taking over Baidu Wenku in the middle of 2022, she used AI to transform the "aging" Wenku into the "most profitable product of Baidu" in just one year. As of June 2024, the payment rate of Baidu Wenku increased by 60% year-on-year. In Wang Ying's words, "The profit margin is not low."
Wang Ying, Vice President of Baidu and Head of the Wenku Business Division. Source: 36kr
The path that Wang Ying has blazed is extremely vital for Baidu. Constrained by the search advertising model, Baidu has always been cautious about investing in AI applications such as "Wen Xiaoyan". However, with the successful commercialization of Wenku transformed by AI, it is equivalent to finding a way for AI tools to make money.
This is a solid incremental income for Baidu, which has long relied on advertising.
Nowadays, the core position of Wenku in Baidu's AI applications is obvious to all - in February 2024, Baidu Wenku was upgraded from a business department to a BU (Business Unit); in September of the same year, Baidu Netdisk was merged into Wenku. "Intelligent Emergence" has learned that Baidu Netdisk has a high annual income and is a truly "hot and valuable asset".
The second female executive who has received much attention this year is Li Ying, Vice President of Baidu Group and CEO of Xiaodu Technology. In October 2023, the original CEO Jing Kun suddenly resigned. Li Ying, an old Baidu employee with 20 years of experience, was appointed to take over Xiaodu. This is the first time for her to shift from software to hardware.
Li Ying, Vice President of Baidu and CEO of Xiaodu Technology. Source: Baidu
However, it is this "novice" in the hardware field who connected all Xiaodu products to the large model and AI system within half a year. She once mentioned to "Intelligent Emergence" the difficulties in reengineering Xiaodu: "For an old product like Xiaodu, the'replacement of the brain' not only needs to face the 'burden' of the reconstruction of the technical architecture, but also needs to reduce the cost consumption of the large model."
The result of the "brain replacement", Li Ying finally chose to speak with products. In the past year, Xiaodu has launched new products such as the "AI Best Friend Machine" and AI glasses, giving Xiaodu the opportunity to remain in the smart hardware arena.
The two female executives manage two key products of Baidu AI, one in software and the other in hardware, which are related to Baidu's present and also indicate the future of Baidu's long-term development of AI.
Wang Ying: Breaking Baidu's Inertia and Creating Baidu's Products
Since 2023, most of the AI businesses that Baidu values have been entrusted to the "veterans of Baidu" who have been in Baidu for more than ten years and have been cultivated by the Baidu system.
For example, Li Ying has been in Baidu for 20 years since her internship; Ping Xiaoli, who is in charge of Baidu's e-commerce business, has been in Baidu for 17 years since she was a management trainee; Li Xiaowan, who once was in charge of the "Wenxin Yiyan" App, is also an executive trained by Baidu herself and has fought tough battles such as the information flow battle in 2018.
However, Wang Ying, who joined Baidu in 2021, is an exception.
Previously, she was the Senior Vice President of Sogou and one of the first-generation product managers in China. She has worked on browsers, QQ Calligraphy, smart hardware, and Internet finance, and has also personally led the B-end commercialization of virtual humans.
It is precisely her diverse business experience outside Baidu that allows this Internet veteran to create products and to a certain extent, shake off Baidu's business inertia. She has also mentioned many times externally, "I have no burden in creating products."
When it comes to using AI to reconstruct Wenku, in order to counter the inertia of this 15-year-old product, Wang Ying has made bold reforms from the employees to the workflow.
She once told "Intelligent Emergence" that the original workflow of "the product proposes requirements and the R & D meets the requirements" is completely not applicable to the AI innovation business:
"Everyone needs to have an in-depth understanding of the business, and the goals should be consistent. In the product requirement discussion stage, the product strategy should select the model, and the technology should also determine how the engineering architecture is implemented."
This requires that the product and strategy teams understand the large model technology, and the R & D team also needs to understand the user requirements. In July 2023, Wang Ying made a major overhaul of Wenku. Only two old employees remained in the algorithm and product teams, and she then built a team that meets the above requirements.
In a large company that has been operating maturely for more than 20 years, making organizational adjustments requires considerable courage. Wang Ying told "Intelligent Emergence" that at that time, she had given a military order to the Wenku team: "If I fail, I'll leave."
Changing the organizational inertia is only the first step. Wang Ying's thinking on AI applications is that user needs and experiences should be placed before "showcasing AI capabilities"; The goal of AI reconstruction is not to make money, but to expand without losing money.
Therefore, rather than directly connecting Wenku to a general model, Wang Ying, earlier than the industry consensus, independently developed the MoE (Mixture of Experts) architecture in Wenku because of its fast reasoning speed and cost savings;
For another example, in order to meet the long-text processing needs of professional scenarios such as research reports and papers, Wang Ying did not integrate all services into Wenku to make it a bloated product. Instead, she directly created a new application called "Orange Article".
At the same time, in terms of the charging model, Wang Ying instead reduced the payment interception of Wenku from the original 60% to 20%. The reason is still to improve the user experience and increase user retention. "While retaining users, allowing them to experience more services can continuously obtain payments and form a positive cycle."
The experience formed by Wenku has now been replicated in other businesses, "We can launch a new product every month". At the World Conference, Wang Ying announced the launch of the "Free Canvas" function. "Free Canvas" is like an intelligent whiteboard. Users can freely select and combine the content on Wenku and Netdisk that needs to be operated through clicking, dialoguing, and box-selecting.
Hidden behind the "Free Canvas" is Wang Ying's ambition to integrate the content ecosystems of Wenku and Netdisk. She remembers that it only took 2 months from the conception to the launch of this product.
The Free Canvas function. Source: Baidu
Li Ying: Taking Over in a Crisis and Replacing Xiaodu's "Brain"
The AI story of Baidu Wenku has a refreshing and exciting quality of changing fate; then the undertone of Xiaodu in the AI era has a flavor of survival from a desperate situation: Continuing Life.
In October 2023, the original CEO Jing Kun suddenly resigned, and Xiaodu lost its helmsman.
As Baidu's only hardware business with over 10 million daily active users, Xiaodu must have a main leader to lead the AI reconstruction of the software and hardware of all products in order to remain in the AI hardware arena.
Li Ying, who comes from a software background, became the person appointed in a crisis.
From Baidu's perspective, passing the baton of Xiaodu to Li Ying is a stable decision. Li Ying has 20 years of work experience in Baidu and has led multiple businesses such as search recommendation, knowledge graph, and Baidu Maps during this period.
More importantly, in 2015, Li Ying once supported the system research and development of "Dumi", the predecessor of Xiaodu. At the same time, the creation of "Ruliu", which has an excellent reputation within Baidu, has given Li Ying a high level of familiarity with the workflows of various Baidu businesses.
However, for Li Ying, who comes from a software background, this "firefighting" is not easy. Just two months before taking the helm of Xiaodu, she launched an AI assistant on Ruliu as the "Baidu CIO".
In order to quickly integrate into the new role, Li Ying's approach is: first, disassemble the user needs, conduct AI reconstruction for Xiaodu, and then explore new AI hardware categories.
Li Ying once told "Intelligent Emergence" that from "Dumi" in 2015 to the current Xiaodu, the core demand of users for the product is only one point: Give a satisfactory answer in one sentence.
She believes that the core logic of Xiaodu's capabilities is the same as the search logic. But the problem that Xiaodu is currently facing is that when facing more complex natural language needs, it is "not smart enough".
Therefore, doing AI reconstruction is described by Li Ying as replacing Xiaodu's "brain". She disassembles different scenarios and needs and supports them with corresponding technical solutions.
For example, using Wenxin 4.0 to support complex and high-context communication, using different agents to respond to the needs in different scenarios, and using the MoE (Mixture of Experts Model) architecture to improve the accuracy of question answering - these technologies are integrated into the unified AI system, DuerOS X.
"Replacing the brain" is only the first step. For Li Ying, the smart speaker is already the narrative of the Jing Kun era. Leading Xiaodu to tell a new story in the AI era is a tough battle to prove her ability.
"Summing up Xiaodu over the years, the core is to create some very good product definitions, such as the smart speaker." Li Ying once told "Intelligent Emergence" that the category definition ability is a core advantage of Xiaodu, and the expansion of Xiaodu's capabilities by AI brings opportunities to explore new categories.
For example, the Xiaodu Tiantian AI Tablet, which was released in April 2024 and marketed under the name of "Best Friend Machine", brought 290 million yuan in sales to Xiaodu in the first half of 2024.
And the Xiaodu AI Glasses, which is planned to be launched in Q2 of 2025, completely bid farewell to the form of speakers and screens, and is expected to become the first AI glasses to be launched in China.
Xiaodu AI Glasses. Source: Baidu
Summary:
For Baidu, a question that must be considered is: When the business is severely impacted by AI, what kind of executives does Baidu need and in what posture to lead the business to win the battle in the AI era.
This question also applies to all enterprises that urgently need to reconstruct their businesses with AI.
All large companies have inertia, such as the so-called "comfort zone", upward reporting, and internal competition... Baidu is no exception. The growth stories of Wenku and Xiaodu not only mean revenue figures for Baidu, but more importantly, they provide a new paradigm for doing innovative businesses.
At this critical moment, Whoever wakes up first, whoever innovates first, and whoever has the courage to bear the trial and error costs of a large company may be able to break through the siege.
Welcome to communicate!