A product manager who spent nearly five years at Nio has left the carmaker for AgiBot, a Chinese humanoid-robotics startup, the latest in a run of product and experience departures from the Shanghai-headquartered EV maker.
Stephen Liu joined AgiBot in June as a Product Manager for Robotic Multimodal Interaction, according to his LinkedIn profile.
Liu’s Nio Career
Liu started at Nio as a product-experience operations intern in Shanghai in late 2021, after an earlier internship at Bosch in Germany.
He then spent more than a year in Munich, interning on the Europe Product Experience team, where he helped validate Nio‘s NT2 intelligent cockpit for European markets.
From September 2023 he worked as an AI product manager in Shanghai, on the software that defines the company’s in-car experience.
His projects included NOMI Suggestions, the proactive recommendation feature in Nio‘s voice assistant; an in-vehicle automation product called Smart Actions; a platform meant to let large language models read and act on vehicle data; and the cockpit’s core interaction framework across Nio‘s regions, models and screen formats.
At AgiBot, Liu will apply the same discipline to machines that move.
The startup, founded in 2023 and based in Shanghai, builds embodied AI models, the data infrastructure to train them and the robots that run them, and has begun building a European sales presence, part of a wider wave of Chinese companies racing to commercialize humanoids.
Liu framed the switch on LinkedIn as a logical step, calling it “a natural continuation” from helping cars understand their surroundings to teaching robots to perceive and act in the physical world.
Other Exits to the Frontier
In October, Nio‘s head of intelligent-driving product and experience, Harry Wong, resigned to join the autonomous-driving startup Momenta as a VP, three years after joining the carmaker, where he had reported directly to founder and chief executive William Li.
Momenta supplies driving software to carmakers including Mercedes-Benz and counts BMW among the brands adopting its technology. Founded in 2016 and also based in Shanghai, it ranks among China’s larger autonomous-driving developers.
Both Wong and Liu led product and experience work on Nio‘s most advanced software — one in autonomy, the other in the AI cockpit — and both left for pure-play developers of the technologies investors now prize.
A Thinning European Team
Liu’s path runs back through Nio‘s European operation, the part of the company that has been cut hardest.
EV reported late last year that Benjamin Steinmetz, Nio‘s product chief for the European and Middle Eastern markets, had resigned.
Steinmetz had joined Nio in April 2022 and led the Europe Product Experience department during Liu’s time on the team.
Sebastian Salera took over the unit, reporting to Ted Li, Nio‘s Associate VP of Product Management and an almost 11-year company veteran.
The EV maker overhauled its European operations earlier this year, letting go of all general managers except in Norway, as exclusively reported by EV.
Nio’s Workforce Cuts
The company disclosed in its annual report that it shed more than 10,600 jobs in 2025, cutting its workforce to 35,032 from 45,635 and eliminating about 40% of its research-and-development staff, the sharpest single-year reduction in its history.
Manufacturing was the only function to add headcount, rising to about 9,650 as new models ramped, a split that concentrated the pain in research and salaried roles rather than on the factory floor.
Nio had added nearly 12,800 people in 2024 as it launched the Onvo and Firefly sub-brands.
Bernstein warned earlier this year that the pullback in R&D could leave Nio exposed as rivals spend more.
Founder and CEO William Li has reiterated earlier this week that, despite the lower R&D investment, efficiency is now higher.
Nio has broken up its European management, shifted sales in several markets to local distributors, and told European owners it will not bring new or updated models to the region until late 2027.
