This strategic upgrade is backed by NIO’s stronger growth expectations for the future after initiating a counter-trend growth in the second half of 2025. According to Chinese media reports, on the afternoon of January 14, NIO CEO William Li shared his personal VAU (Vision Action Upgrade) for 2026 at an internal meeting. A key background detail: on January 5 this year, NIO officially established the AGI Committee via internal email, with its first core members comprising nearly 30 AI technical experts from 15 first-tier departments. The committee will focus on three priorities: Sensing and analyzing industry AI technology trends to serve the company’s AI strategic goal planning; Mapping and iterating the company’s full-domain AI technical capability landscape to promote collaborative construction and cross-domain reuse of AI capabilities; Establishing and operating an AI technology and talent community for the entire company to continuously enhance the AI technical atmosphere and accelerate AI talent development. NIO Vice President Shaoqing Ren has received the Test of Time Award at the 2025 Conference on NeurIPS. At this meeting, Li also emphasized that NIO will increase investment in artificial intelligence in 2026, and hopes all employees will systematically and deeply apply AI to enhance product competitiveness and corporate operational efficiency. He identified two key directions for AI investment: first, strengthening full-stack autonomous driving R&D, with plans to return to the industry’s top tier through three major version updates within the year; second, implementing AI across the entire business chain to build a company-level AI capability system. Li required that AI applications must not be limited to autonomous driving alone, but must penetrate all business units including “production, manufacturing, supply chain, sales, and even finance and human resources.” This strategic upgrade is backed by NIO’s stronger growth expectations for the future after initiating a counter-trend growth in the second half of 2025. Li reviewed at the meeting that while the company faced significant challenges in the first half of 2025, it achieved strong sales in the second half driven by “two large vehicles.” He specifically noted that the ONVO L90 won the annual sales championship for pure electric three-row SUVs, the all-new ES8 delivered 40,000 units within 100 days of launch, and the Firefly’s sales exceeded initial expectations. The 40,000th unit of NIO’s all-new ES8 has been delivered. He revealed that the company overall moved from losses in Q1 to “profit opportunities” in Q4, completing counter-trend growth and entering the “third stage of company development.” Based on this, Li Bin set a goal of steady annual growth of 40%-50% for NIO’s third development cycle (the next 3-5 years). Despite setting ambitious growth and transformation goals, Li also soberly pointed out in his internal speech that the company’s biggest challenge does not come from external markets or products, but from internal “mindset.” He reminded the team that the company’s market share in China is still less than 2%, leaving at least 5x room for growth.