Baidu's overseas AI office tool Kooko reaches 10 million users in one year, targets Latin America

Author: Li Xinma

Remarkable Agents: Discovering and introducing the Agents that are changing the world — with on-the-ground reports, conversations, and details that don't make it into the news.

If you walk into a café or restaurant in São Paulo or Rio de Janeiro and scan the QR code on the table, chances are you won't see a standardized ordering interface like in China. Instead, you'll likely land on the business's own website or the owner's personal Instagram account. In Brazil, over 70% of small businesses use social media platforms to attract customers. This unique market dynamic has given rise to a fragmented ecosystem of freelancers offering design, website building, and short video production services.

Consider a local digital marketing freelancer who received an order from a hamburger delivery shop. The deliverables included a website, logo, short videos, and social media content — all for a price equivalent to just 650 RMB. Too much work for too little pay? Not exactly. The freelancer simply handed over a basic set of materials to Kooko — a landing page, logo, vertical video, and a proposal PPT — and everything was completed. He then packaged the deliverables into a standardized business proposal to sell to other local small businesses.

Image source: Baidu

This story was shared by Wen Siying, head of Baidu's Personal Super Intelligence Business Group and Overseas Business Department. But how did a Chinese-made office AI become a productivity tool for a Brazilian user?

01. A Name That Was Hard to Spell — Why Did It Take a Year to Change?

You may not have heard of Kooko. Before that, it was called Oreate.

Oreate originally launched as an academic research and writing tool for students and educators. In September 2025, it debuted on Product Hunt as a "one-stop AI workbench" and briefly topped the Product of the Day chart.

After launch, Oreate quickly surpassed 1 million users. In May 2026, its general agent architecture was upgraded, enabling it to understand longer tasks, break them down into steps, and combine different capabilities to produce deliverables. On September 21, Oreate officially rebranded as Kooko, by which time its overseas user base had exceeded 10 million, with paying users spanning 197 countries and regions.

At the launch event, Baidu also shared two key metrics:

• 72% of user conversations on Kooko directly resulted in deliverables.
• Monthly ARR growth over the past month: 50% month-over-month.

Why the name change? First, to unify the brand across different overseas markets. Kooko was also preparing to launch a standalone professional desktop client and mobile app. "The funny thing is, 'Oreate' was hard to understand. Foreign users kept asking, 'Is it an O or a C?' — the explanation cost was high," explained Wang Ying, Baidu's Vice President and President of the Personal Super Intelligence Business Group (PSIG). "After we settled on 'Kuku' in China, we searched for all its derivative names and surveyed overseas users. They loved 'Kooko' because it's easy to spell and impossible to get wrong — the switching cost is very low."

What does Kooko actually do? It's not complicated, especially for Chinese users who may already be familiar with it. Kooko and China's Kuku AI share the same technical foundation, architecture, and Agent Harness. "As it evolved into a general agent, it's essentially the same framework as the domestic version — just with different models, regional data, and user habits to produce deliverables. But the framework itself is identical," Wang said.

On the same day, Baidu's Wenku and Wangpan announced that the global monthly active users of Kuku AI for office productivity had surpassed 40 million. For those unfamiliar with Kuku AI: users don't need to shuttle between search tools, cloud drives, office software, and AI assistants. Kooko can read authorized public and private content, conduct research, analysis, and creation, and directly deliver documents, PPTs, data tables, and code — all editable in an online Office editor. User modifications, preferences, and project outcomes are stored as long-term memory, serving as context for future tasks.

02. North America Is Crowded, but Latin America Is Still a Blue Ocean

Choosing the right赛道 (track) is important, but choosing the right market is equally critical. The office AI space is flooded with products — everyone knows how competitive the domestic Chinese market is, and overseas, North America is just as fierce. Wen Siying divides the overseas market into two segments:

• Latin America (Brazil, Colombia, etc.) — a key investment area.
• North America and Europe — still building core user bases.

Overseas users fall into two main categories:

1. Corporate employees — similar to the domestic market.
2. Independent entrepreneurs and individual workers — the so-called OPC (One-Person Company) demographic.

According to Wen, Latin America has a very large self-employed workforce. Brazil alone has about 26 million individual entrepreneurs, a significant share of the employed population. In Colombia, 70% of respondents know someone who is starting a business, and 40% of early-stage entrepreneurs are solo founders with no employees.

For example, a user in Colombia wanted to build a financial management app for small businesses. He used Kooko to:

• Conduct market research to identify the target audience and problem to solve.
• Create an interactive prototype.
• Produce a series of marketing images and videos, including a pitch deck.
• Draft company incorporation documents and other startup materials.

In total, the entire process required just 17 rounds of conversation.

But this doesn't mean Kooko got lucky. It's not the only "strong player" in Latin America. Wen noted that many users use multiple tools simultaneously, valuing results over brand loyalty: "Many of our paying users are also ChatGPT or Claude users. They choose the best solution for the task at hand, rather than sticking to one product exclusively."

There are more details hidden in Kooko's overseas expansion.

03. Localization and "Dare to Be Late"

Overseas, the traditional office trio — PPT, Word, Excel — still dominate. This is a key reason for Kooko's rapid growth. "We had already built the editors and reconstruction capabilities for all three tools early on," Wang said. Making PPTs is a core office AI function, but have you considered what kind of PPTs overseas users actually want?

True localization goes beyond simple translation. Wen explained that in the AI PPT scenario, many overseas users care less about content presentation and more about simplicity. Color schemes and design styles also vary significantly by country. "We spent a lot of time fine-tuning effects to deliver a better experience."

User behavior also drove changes to Kooko's product architecture. Initially, many features were standalone — generating a PPT or an image. But in practice, users creating a PPT would naturally need image generation to replace or optimize visuals. Similarly, coding capabilities were frequently used for visualization or website building. "This gave us a big insight: users don't care whether they enter through a single-point feature or a full workflow. They just want results," Wen said. After the general agent framework upgrade, user engagement depth, retention, and payment rates all improved significantly. "This has become one of our most effective product iteration methods."

Even with competition from tech giants, Wang believes the pressure is less intense than in the domestic market. She offered a perspective: Microsoft, despite its current dominance, carries a heavy historical burden. "It's very difficult for Microsoft to directly upgrade into a general agent because the underlying product architecture is different — it's built on an editor with AI layered on top. The entire interaction logic is different. It's hard to abandon the old foundation and build something completely AI-native."

Wang has a view on the office AI race: Speed today doesn't guarantee long-term success. She cited a saying from Duan Yongping — "Dare to be late": "You build a house while tearing down another. When you tear it down, you find the core components and reusable assets, then assemble them in a new era. You can't be too slow — or your cognition falls behind. But being fast doesn't mean you win. You need to be fast and willing to quickly overturn yourself."

The office AI race is a marathon. Studying how to run far is more important than how to run fast right now.

Final Thoughts

This year marks a wave of Chinese office AI products going global.

• In early August, Alibaba's Qwen Office launched public testing in China, followed by its international version Qwen Work just over 20 days later, targeting Asia, the Middle East, and Latin America.
• Tencent's WorkBuddy international version launched in May, with Southeast Asia as a key focus.
• ByteDance's AnyGen went live overseas in December 2025, while its overseas version of Feishu, Lark, had already launched in 2019 — five months earlier than the domestic version.

Although the European and American office markets are largely locked down by Microsoft and Google, there remains vast overseas market potential — and this is the perfect opportunity for Chinese tech companies to enter with Agent capabilities. Over the next year, Kooko plans to:

• Expand around local Skills, expert skills, and connector development.
• Partner with local KOCs, KOLs, and experts to build a Skill ecosystem.
• Invest more in mainstream overseas connectors.
• Launch a personal persistent "sandbox" to store user habits and preferences long-term.
• Continuously iterate on reusable automated workflows.

Competition will only intensify, and technological gaps between products may widen at any time. How Kooko will evolve remains an open question. But one thing is certain, as Wang said: "We want general intelligence to take root and thrive everywhere in the world."

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