Beyond the Chatbot: Big Tech’s Pragmatic Pivot to the Enterprise Agent
TMTPOST — For the past year, the global artificial intelligence boom has lived largely in the consumer cloud—a world of conversational novelties, fleeting viral interactions, and generative text experiments. But inside the high-tech corridors of China’s leading enterprise software providers, the romantic era of the broad-spectrum large language model (LLM) is giving way to a much more calculating, corporate reality. On July 10, 2026, Baidu formally advanced its general-purpose intelligent agent product, "Baidu Dazi," into the enterprise market. The transition moves the platform beyond its origins as an individual office assistant and into a structured corporate agent framework designed to anchor internal workflows. The expansion comes as the technology sector experiences an industry-w