Robin Li

Robin Li, born Li Yanhong, built Baidu into the search engine that indexes and organises data for the Chinese-speaking internet, and has since pushed the company to re-found itself around generative AI. As co-founder, chairman and chief executive, he has steered Baidu from a search start-up to a diversified AI, cloud and autonomous-driving group.

Li studied information management at Peking University before earning a master's degree in computer science from the State University of New York at Buffalo. He worked on search-ranking technology at Dow Jones and Infoseek in Silicon Valley, where he developed patented link-analysis algorithms, before returning to China to co-found Baidu with Eric Xu in January 2000.

Baidu grew into China's dominant search engine, listing on NASDAQ in 2005 in a debut that made it one of the best-performing IPOs of its era. Over the following decade the company expanded into maps, video, cloud computing and, through its Apollo programme, autonomous driving, amassing vast troves of search, location and mobility data along the way.

From the mid-2010s Li repositioned Baidu around artificial intelligence, declaring the company 'all in on AI.' That bet culminated in the March 2023 launch of Ernie Bot (Wenxin Yiyan), one of China's first major large language model products, followed by continued investment in Baidu's Ernie model family and AI cloud services aimed at enterprise customers.

By 2026 Li was framing Baidu's future around AI agents rather than model competition alone, arguing that the measure of AI's success is autonomous agents handling real work, with Baidu reporting AI-related revenue surpassing half of its cloud business. He remains one of the most prominent voices shaping how Chinese industry and policymakers think about applied, agent-driven AI.