Li Yanhong Proposes New Metric for AI Era: Daily Active Agents (DAA) to Be Key Indicator

At the Create2026 Baidu AI Developer Conference, Baidu founder Li Yanhong proposed a new metric for the AI era—Daily Active Agents (DAA), corresponding to the mobile internet's Daily Active Users (DAU). He argued that the current industry's common Token consumption metric represents cost rather than benefit, measuring input instead of output.

Li Yanhong pointed out that in the agent era, we should focus on how many agents work for humans and deliver results; DAA is closer to the essence of value. Meanwhile, the agent wave drives individual evolution: the smallest productivity unit becomes "a person plus an agent team", and enterprises need to consider the "agent-first strategy" to build new organizations where humans and agents evolve together.