NetEase Youdao AI Open Day: Zhou Feng says AI competition has entered the 'Model + Agent + Workflow' era

NetEase Youdao held its "NEXT, AGENT | Youdao AI Open Day" in Beijing on September 16. According to QbitAI's report, Zhou Feng, the company's chief executive, told the event that competition in AI capability is entering a "Model + Agent + Workflow" era.

The framing shifts the unit of competition away from a single model and toward a combination: the model supplies capability, the agent handles scheduling inside a concrete task, and the workflow determines whether any of it survives contact with real business processes.

The event theme, "NEXT, AGENT", matches that judgement, with agents placed at the centre of what Youdao showed. The report also treats the company's approach, described as its "Youdao solution" for the AI era, as the main item on the agenda.

Read through the report, the emphasis falls on organising AI capability into specific scenarios and processes rather than competing purely on model parameters or single-feature demos.

That emphasis has a practical basis. For an agent to deliver value it has to handle task decomposition, tool calling, permissions and reliable results, all of which live at the workflow layer and do not arrive automatically with a better model.

What to watch is which product forms the "Youdao solution" takes, which scenarios it proves out first, and whether the model-plus-agent-plus-workflow combination produces efficiency gains that can actually be measured.