Baidu is turning an overseas productivity product into a more visible part of its AI strategy. At a September 21 Baidu AI Day event, the company said it would accelerate the international expansion of its AI productivity business and rebrand its overseas product, previously known as Oreate AI, as Kooko.
The change is more than a new name. According to TechNode’s account of the announcement, Kooko is designed as a workspace for research, analysis, documents, presentations, spreadsheets, and code. It combines persistent work memory with specialized skills, content that users permit it to access, and office-document editing. The product is intended to keep track of edits, preferences, and project outputs so that a later task begins with more context than a blank chat window.
Baidu says Kooko has surpassed 10 million overseas users. It also says the product has paying customers in 197 countries and regions and that annual recurring revenue has grown 50% month over month. Those are Baidu-reported figures, not independently audited metrics. The sources do not provide an ARR base, currency, absolute amount, accounting definition, or methodology for that reported growth.
The announcement adds a fresh overseas-product angle for a company whose earlier EastFrontier coverage includes DuMate and Baidu’s AI revenue picture. Kooko is a different product: an AI workspace aimed at users outside China.
From Oreate AI to a broader workbench
Baidu launched Oreate AI overseas in 2025, according to EqualOcean, and adopted a general-purpose agent architecture in May 2026 before the September rebrand to Kooko. TechNode describes the product as having evolved from the earlier offering into a platform that can combine memories and skills with a user’s actual documents and work environment.
That product design addresses a basic limitation of standalone chatbots. A conversational model can explain an idea or draft a paragraph, but work often involves a sequence of files, instructions, revisions, and decisions. A person researching a market may need to read material, compare claims, create a table, revise a presentation, and return to the same project later. Kooko’s value proposition is that the system should preserve enough context to help with that chain of work.
The company’s chosen name also signals a broader ambition than a single feature. The sources describe a product intended to handle documents, presentations, spreadsheets, and code, rather than a tool limited to one office format. That does not establish technical superiority or prove that the product can complete all such tasks reliably. But it shows Baidu is framing Kooko as a workbench for deliverables, not simply a chat interface.
The product’s overseas story has to be kept separate from a larger figure reported by EqualOcean for Baidu’s broader Chinese AI office offering, 库库AI. That source cites more than 40 million global monthly active users for the broader offering, but it explicitly distinguishes that measurement from Kooko’s overseas-user count. The 40 million figure should not be used as if it were Kooko’s audience.
How Baidu plans to localize Kooko
TechNode reports that Baidu is emphasizing localization instead of presenting Kooko as a direct global challenger to a single product such as ChatGPT. Adam Wen, a Baidu executive responsible for overseas work in its personal-intelligence division, told the outlet that users in markets including Brazil and Colombia focus on whether a product understands local context and produces useful output at an acceptable speed and cost.
That is a practical way to define the international agent market. A company does not win a work-software customer solely by translating its interface. It has to fit the languages, common documents, local cloud services, business habits, and expectations of that market. It also has to persuade users to allow a new system to work with sensitive material, which makes trust and control part of the product experience.
Baidu says it is using different regions as test environments. TechNode reports that the company is trying Kooko with large freelance and self-employed user groups in Latin America. In Europe, it is watching behavior before deciding whether to turn those patterns into features, plugins, or service packages. The company also says it put more emphasis on coding and site-building after seeing users employ its coding tools to make websites.
Those experiments are early signals, not proof of product-market fit. The sources do not disclose retention, pricing, paid conversion, or individual market revenue. They also do not establish how the product handles data in each jurisdiction, even though Wen told TechNode that Baidu applies the same security and privacy approach across markets. That remains an attributed company statement without a published technical or compliance audit in the sources reviewed.
The commercial test for Kooko
Kooko is being positioned for smaller, recurring pieces of work: a document that needs revision, a data set that needs explanation, a client presentation, a coding task, or a site that needs to be built.
The reporting does not disclose retention, pricing, paid conversion, or individual market revenue. The reported 50% month-over-month ARR growth is a company statement without a disclosed base.
The sources do not supply enough metrics to judge the durability of the overseas business.
For now, the evidence supports a clear but bounded conclusion. Baidu has renamed its overseas productivity product Kooko, says it has reached 10 million overseas users, and is testing localized workflows across markets. The next test is whether those experiments become a durable global business with customer retention and revenue that can be measured beyond the company’s own announcement.