The news: Chinese tech giant Baidu launched MuseSteamer, a business-oriented image-to-video AI generator that produces 10-second clips in three formats: Turbo, Pro, and Lite.

• Unlike consumer-friendly offerings from OpenAI, ByteDance, or Tencent, Baidu’s tool is positioned and marketed to enterprise users.
• The company also upgraded its search engine to support longer queries and multimodal inputs—including voice and image—to deliver improved AI-powered results.

Zooming out: Everyone is trying to offer video generators these days. Adobe, Amazon, YouTube, and more are fueling the next wave of video ads with AI tools that help small businesses automate and personalize ad creation at scale.

• TikTok’s AI Alive turns static photos into animated Stories, aiming to retain creators with unique, in-app tools amid political pressure and rising competition.
• Higgsfield’s Soul offers fashion-grade realism for AI images and videos, helping marketers produce campaign-quality assets faster and cheaper—with over 50 customizable presets.
• As YouTube Shorts hit 200 billion daily views, the company added Google’s Veo 3 AI video-generation tool to help creators improve their content.

Why it matters: Generative video tools are becoming foundational for marketers.

• 49% of marketers report using AI for video creation on a daily basis, underscoring a major shift in how marketers develop creative assets.
• Within advertising agencies, 45.6% use AI for video and image production, per a March 2025 Basis Technologies report. Yet only 44.4% report using AI to streamline editing workflows, highlighting inefficiencies in adoption.
• An April 2025 Wondercraft study found that 20% of content creators regularly use AI video tools like VEED and Runway. That’s nearly on par with AI adoption for audio (21%) and image generation (21%), though chat tools still lead (38%).
• The near-equal use of visual and audio AI points to a broader shift: Creators are increasingly fluent across multiple content formats, and video is quickly becoming a default creative medium.

Our take: Generative video isn’t a future trend; it’s already part of the daily toolkit for nearly half of marketers and creators, and Baidu’s MuseSteamer shows how serious enterprise players are becoming about controlling the production pipeline and delivering scalable content fast.

While Western attention often centers on tools like Sora, the pace of innovation in China’s AI ecosystem demands equal consideration and could soon extend to the US. Baidu’s enterprise-only approach could give it a competitive edge in monetization and deployment, especially as businesses look for reliable partners that can integrate seamlessly into existing workflows. As video becomes the default for creative output, tools that combine speed, scale, and quality will be the ones that stick.