NIO CEO Li Bin: Smart EVs Are the Highest-Volume Embodied AI Agents
At the 2026 World Internet Conference Wuzhen Summit, NIO founder and CEO Li Bin stated that smart electric vehicles currently represent the highest-volume embodied AI agents and the largest AI application industry. This perspective reframes standard automotive manufacturing within the broader context of robotics and artificial intelligence, highlighting how millions of connected vehicles are already deploying advanced machine learning models in the real physical world. Li Bin noted that NIO's smart driving system, based on a world model architecture and closed-loop reinforcement learning, has been deployed in over 950,000 vehicles, accumulating over 9.14 billion safe driving kilometers.
## BACKGROUND
Embodied AI refers to AI systems equipped with a physical form, such as robots or vehicles, that can interact with and navigate the physical world using sensors and actuators. In China, smart electric vehicles widely utilize combination driving assistance and navigate-on-autopilot features as part of growing autonomous driving development.