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The Stack: How AI Is Driving Rapid Change in Business

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This week’s column dives into Mary Meeker’s latest report, and also looks at how Road Runner Sports is elevating its customer experience
This story is part of “The Stack,” a weekly column that takes a deep dive into the ways tech companies are shaping the future of fitness and wellness

I was surprised to see an email in my inbox about a new report from Bond, the venture capital firm based in San Francisco and founded by Mary Meeker. Following the link brought me to a massive 340-page report. It was like Christmas in July.

If you don’t know, Meeker is known as the “Queen of the Internet.” While at Morgan Stanley, Meeker and Chris DePuy published “The Internet Report,” which guided investors through the dot-com boom era and beyond. So, what does she and her co-authors of “Trends – Artificial Intelligence” have to say today? A lot.

The report covers everything from soup to nuts, and includes chapters on AI deployment, usage, costs, growth, the competitive landscape, capital expenditures and IRL uses such as at work.  

The report paints an AI landscape using numerous graphs and charts, mostly festooned with arrows that go up, but also with some bleak data points such as “monetization threats.”

One of the key takeaways of the report is the speed of change occurring.

“To say the world is changing at unprecedented rates is an understatement,” the report’s authors said. “Rapid and transformative technology innovation/adoption represent key underpinnings of these changes. As does leadership evolution for the global powers.”

The report noted the rise of Google, Alibaba and Facebook – each experiencing growth arcs that were relatively steady.

“Fast forward to today with the world’s organized, connected and accessible information being supercharged by artificial intelligence, accelerating computing power and semi-borderless capital … all driving massive change,” the authors of the report said. “Sport provides a good analogy for AI’s constant improvements. As athletes continue to wow us and break records, their talent is increasingly enhanced by better data/inputs/training. The same is true for businesses, where computers are ingesting massive datasets to get smarter and more competitive.”

Over time, the speed of change is only expected to increase, so hang on.

If you want to learn more, download the report here

The New Kid on the Block

The latest development in AI is “Agentic AI,” which is the spooky one that works autonomously with little human oversight. Instead, it runs on its own to reach specific goals. This form of AI joins the ranks of other powerful models, such as predictive and generative AI. In truth, Agentic AI is not so much spooky as it is advanced.

For the retail, hospitality and fitness industries, companies such as Profitmind are working with businesses to create an “intelligence layer” with Agentic AI that can assist in price optimization, performance analysis and inventory analysis. It can even be used in competitive and white space analysis.

SalesRevv, a software platform for fitness brands, uses agentic AI in text messages (credit: SalesRevv)

In IBM’s latest “Global C-suite Series” report, analysts polled CEOs and looked at how Agentic AI can help businesses move from profitability to greater productivity. 

“Technology promises to help them make smarter, better decisions that drive growth and stakeholder value,” the report’s authors said. “AI agents, in particular, offer predictive capabilities that let teams see the impact of change before they lift a finger. This autonomous, adaptive and self-iterating technology is already dramatically changing how businesses operate.”

Business leaders are taking note. IBM’s survey of executives found that 61 percent of CEOs polled “say their organization is actively adopting AI agents and preparing to implement them at scale.”

Tying Everything Together

Road Runner Sports, the nationwide fitness retailer, recently teamed up with unified commerce solutions leader Aptos to implement the tech company’s modern, mobile-first Point of Sale (POS) platform, Aptos One. This strategic deployment, extending across Road Runner Sports’ 50-plus U.S. stores, aims to significantly enhance customer engagement and omnichannel capabilities.

Deploying Aptos One is in response to growing consumer demands for an overall better shopping experience, whether it is online, in a physical store or at a pop-up shop. Personalization and seamless experiences are key.

Aptos said the integration of Aptos One will seamlessly connect with Road Runner Sports’ existing Aptos SaaS applications, including Merchandising, Order Management System (OMS), Customer Relationship Management (CRM) and Sales Audit. The company said this connectivity will enable highly personalized customer service, real-time inventory visibility and a unified experience across online and offline interactions.

San Diego-based Road Runner Sports is renowned for its diverse selection of athletic shoes, apparel and fitness devices. Their shoppers are fiercely loyal and expect a high level of personalization. The company’s commitment to inspiring active and healthy lifestyles is exemplified by its unique Fit Finder technology, which provides in-store and online customers with personalized shoe fittings, and its popular membership program, offering extended guarantees and exclusive benefits. 

“We’ve redefined the traditional shoe buying experience,” Tom Compogiannis, chief financial officer at Road Runner Sports, said in a statement. “Our interest in Aptos One stemmed from our continuous pursuit of elevating our customers’ journey.”

exterior of a Road Runner Sports store
credit: Arne Beruldsen/shutterstock.com

Beyond in-store enhancements, Compogiannis foresees significant opportunities for Aptos One to facilitate Road Runner Sports’ presence at external events such as pop-up shops, expos and gatherings.

“We want to interact with Road Runner Sports customers and potential customers wherever they are,” Compogiannis added. “As a cloud-native, mobile-first solution, Aptos One makes it easy to conduct selling activities just about anywhere.”

This capability allows store teams to engage with local communities, expanding customer acquisition and sales opportunities outside traditional store environments.”

Jeremy Grunzweig, general manager at Aptos, emphasized that Aptos One was developed in response to retailer feedback, combining robust enterprise-grade, omnichannel POS functionality with a mobile-first design.

For inquiries and tips related to “The Stack,” please reach out to [email protected]





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Why AI alone can’t guarantee business success, expert cautions

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As companies around the world race to adopt artificial intelligence (AI), strategy expert Shotunde Taiwo urges business leaders to look beyond the hype and focus on aligning technology with clear strategic goals.

Taiwo, a finance and strategy professional, cautions that while AI offers transformative potential, it is not a guaranteed path to success. Without a coherent strategy, organisations risk misdirecting resources, entrenching inefficiencies, and failing to deliver meaningful value from their AI investments.

“AI cannot substitute for strategic clarity,” she explains, stressing the importance of purposeful direction before deploying advanced digital tools. Business leaders, she says, must first define their objectives, only then can AI act as an effective enabler rather than an expensive distraction.

Taiwo stated that many organisations are investing heavily in AI labs, data infrastructure, and talent acquisition without clearly defined business outcomes. This approach, she notes, risks undermining the very efficiencies these technologies are meant to create.

For example, a retail business lacking a distinctive value proposition cannot expect a recommendation engine to deliver meaningful differentiation. Similarly, manufacturers without well-structured pricing strategies will find limited benefit in predictive analytics. “AI amplifies what’s already there,” she adds. “It rewards businesses with strong foundations and exposes those without.”

According to Taiwo, the true value of AI emerges when it is guided by intelligent, strategic intent. High-performing organisations use AI to solve well-defined problems aligned with commercial goals, often framed by business analysts or strategic leaders who understand both operational realities and broader business priorities.

She cites Amazon’s recommendation engine and UPS’s route optimisation algorithms as models of effective AI deployment. In both cases, technology served a clear purpose: boosting customer retention and streamlining logistics, respectively. When guided by strategy, AI becomes a force multiplier, enhancing forecasting, enabling automation, and improving personalisation where workflows are already well-defined.


On the other hand, even the most advanced AI systems falter in the absence of sound strategy. Common pitfalls include deploying machine learning models without a business case, focusing on tools rather than problems, collecting data without a clear use, and optimising narrow metrics at the expense of enterprise-wide goals. These missteps often result in underwhelming pilots and disillusioned stakeholders, issues strategic professionals are well-equipped to navigate and avoid.

In this sense, AI adoption can serve as a strategic diagnostic. Taiwo suggests that when business leaders struggle to define impactful AI use cases, it often reflects deeper ambiguity in their organisational direction. Key questions, such as where value is created, who the primary customer is, or which decisions would benefit most from improved speed or accuracy, are not technical, but fundamentally strategic.

AI, she says, acts as a mirror, revealing strengths and weaknesses in how a business is positioned, differentiated, and aligned across functions. Strategic leaders and business analysts are uniquely positioned to interpret these insights, inform course corrections, and guide effective technology investments.

Looking ahead, Taiwo argues that strategy in the AI era must be data-literate, agile, ethically grounded, and above all, human-centred. Leaders must understand what data they have, and how it can be harnessed, without needing to become technologists themselves.

Organisations must be nimble enough to act on AI-driven insights, whether through supply chain reconfiguration or dynamic pricing. Ethics, too, are critical, especially as AI increasingly impacts areas such as hiring, lending, and content moderation. “AI is not a replacement for strategy – it is a reflection of it,” she said.

In organisations with clarity and discipline, AI can unlock significant value. In those without, it risks adding cost and complexity. The responsibility for today’s leaders is to ensure that technology serves the business, not the other way around.



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XTransfer: Pioneering AI-Driven Transformation in B2B Foreign Trade Payment

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HONG KONG SAR – Media OutReach Newswire – 11 July 2025 – In the era of global economic integration, small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) face both unprecedented challenges and exciting new opportunities. XTransfer, the World’s Leading & China’s No.1 B2B Cross-Border Trade Payment Platform, is empowering over 700,000 SMEs across more than 200 countries with innovative financial solutions. The company’s relentless pursuit of technological advancement, especially in artificial intelligence (AI), is redefining the standards of risk control and digital transformation in the foreign trade finance industry.

XTransfer supports global SMEs with secure and seamless cross-border payments.

TradePilot: The First Large Language Model in Foreign Trade Finance
At the core of XTransfer’s innovation is TradePilot, the first large language model (LLM) tailored for the global foreign trade financial sector. Starting development in 2023, TradePilot was designed to leverage cutting-edge AI technologies, such as multimodal information extraction, long-context processing, and AI agents, to address the unique complexities of B2B international trade.

TradePilot’s journey has been marked by rapid iteration and real-world validation. In June 2024, two versions of TradePilot outperformed both domestic and international LLMs, including GPT-4, in a professional knowledge assessment, winning first place. This achievement highlights not only XTransfer’s technical prowess but also the rising maturity of China’s AI ecosystem in mission-critical financial applications.

Enhancing Risk Control and Anti-Money Laundering
One of the most significant applications of AI at XTransfer is in risk management, particularly anti-money laundering (AML) controls. B2B cross-border trade introduces data challenges, transactions are often fragmented, unstandardized, and partially offline, making it hard to monitor and assess risks. Traditional banks, reliant on manual AML checks, have struggled to efficiently serve SMEs due to high costs and operational inefficiencies.

XTransfer’s solution is a data-driven, automated AML risk control infrastructure, powered by TradePilot. By transforming unstructured business and transaction data into structured, analyzable formats, TradePilot enables precise risk prediction and real-time anomaly detection. For example, the system can flag suspicious export patterns that deviate from a country’s industrial profile or automatically match buyer and seller information across various documents, such as proforma invoices and logistics papers, enhancing both compliance and operational efficiency.

The results speak for themselves: what once required laborious manual intervention can now be handled at scale, allowing banks and financial institutions to serve SMEs with the same rigour and security as multinational corporations. This boosts financial inclusion and levels the playing field for smaller businesses in global trade.

Intelligent Customer Service and Digital Empowerment
Beyond risk control, AI infuses every side of XTransfer’s product ecosystem. The company’s intelligent customer relationship management (CRM) system leverages TradePilot for enhanced semantic understanding, emotion recognition, and effective response generation. Since integrating TradePilot, XTransfer’s AI-driven customer service resolution rate has soared from 13% to over 84%, dramatically improving user satisfaction and operational scale.

XTransfer’s CRM also features AI-powered tools such as multilingual letter writing, instant website building, and the pioneering “AI Employee” service. These innovations help SMEs with limited technical or language resources to efficiently reach global buyers, manage operations, and establish an online presence, in as little as 30 seconds. Over 10,000 foreign trade businesses have already benefited from these services, lowering the barriers to digital adoption and accelerating their international growth.

Commitment to Data Security and Future Outlook
XTransfer’s technological architecture is built on robust, distributed computing principles, ensuring high performance and reliability. The company adheres strictly to international and regional laws regarding data privacy, employing encryption, access controls, and audit mechanisms to safeguard user data.

Looking forward, XTransfer aims further to promote the adoption of its AI-powered TradePilot model, thereby accelerating the digital transformation of the B2B foreign trade finance sector. Weitong Li, Senior Technology Director of XTransfer, emphasises that the successful deployment of TradePilot is both a testament to XTransfer’s innovation and a catalyst for smarter, safer, and more accessible global trade.

As foreign trade becomes increasingly intelligent and data-driven, XTransfer stands at the forefront, empowering SMEs to explore broader markets and seize new opportunities in the evolving global economy.

Hashtag: #XTransfer #AI #Tradepilot #LLM #LargeLanguageModel #Crossborder #Payment #SMEs

https://www.xtransfer.com
https://www.linkedin.com/company/xtransfer.cn
https://x.com/xtransferglobal
https://www.facebook.com/XTransferGlobal/
https://www.instagram.com/xtransfer.global

The issuer is solely responsible for the content of this announcement.

About XTransfer

XTransfer, the world-leading and China’s No.1 B2B Cross-Border Trade Payment Platform, is dedicated to providing small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) with secure, compliant, fast, convenient and low-cost foreign trade payment and fund collection solutions, significantly reducing the cost of global expansion and enhancing global competitiveness. Founded in 2017, the company is headquartered in Shanghai and has branches in Hong Kong SAR, the United Kingdom, the Netherlands, the United States, Canada, Australia, Singapore, Vietnam, Thailand, Malaysia, the Philippines, the UAE, and Nigeria. XTransfer has obtained local payment licences in Mainland China, Hong Kong SAR, Singapore, the United Kingdom, the Netherlands, the United States, Canada, and Australia. With more than 700,000 enterprise clients, XTransfer has become the industry No.1 in China.

By cooperating with well-known multinational banks and financial institutions, XTransfer has built a unified global multi-currency clearing network and a data-based, automated, internet-based and intelligent anti-money laundering risk control infrastructure centred on SMEs. XTransfer uses technology as a bridge to link large financial institutions and SMEs around the world, allowing SMEs to enjoy the same level of cross-border financial services as large multinational corporations.

XTransfer completed its Series D financing in September 2021 and achieved unicorn status. The Company possesses a diverse composition of international investors, including D1 Capital Partners LP, Telstra Ventures, China Merchants Venture, eWTP Capital, Yunqi Capital, Gaorong Capital, 01VC, MindWorks and Lavender Hill Capital Partners.

For more information, please visit: https://www.xtransfer.com/





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Microsoft Veteran Devender Bansal Joins MLAI Digital as CEO & Co-founder for Global business (APAC and EMEA) to Drive Agentic AI Innovation

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New Delhi [India], July 11: MLAI Digital, the rapidly growing deep tech startup in the Agentic AI space, has leveraged its strategic footprint and product innovation by announcing this appointment of Devender Bansal as CEO (APAC and EMEA).

Devender is a technology leader with more than 2.5 decades in enterprise transformation. Prior to this, he was in charge of driving technology sales for Microsoft’s Cloud and AI business in corporate accounts across India and Southeast Asia, forging partnerships with CXOs, expanding technical teams and capturing market share across major verticals.

“MLAI Digital’s bold vision for Agentic AI, paired with the hustle and agility of a startup, really struck a chord with me,” said Devender. “We’re building something that doesn’t just automate work — it reimagines how intelligence is orchestrated across the enterprise.”

As CEO & Co-founder for APAC and EMEA, Devender will lead MLAI’s global expansion across these regions, focusing on product scaling, strategic alliances, and vertical-specific AI deployment. His goal? To build a global Agentic AI brand – a new category of intelligent systems designed to reason, act, and evolve autonomously.

The firm’s leadership in the BFSI, & strong presence in manufacturing and logistics sectors have started seeing early success for the global venture, with solutions like real-time fraud detection & predictive asset maintenance.

“We’re thrilled to have Devender onboard,” said Arpit Gupta, CTO & Founder, MLAI Digital. “His strategic mindset, deep tech acumen, and experience scaling businesses will be invaluable as we take MLAI Digital to new markets.”

Devender is equally excited about the team he’s joining. “MLAI team is one of the smartest & agile set of people to interact with,” he shared. “They’re not just building AI, they’re building it right, with purpose, ethics, and a forward-looking mindset.”

With this leadership addition, MLAI Digital is accelerating growth plans. The entity will focus on innovation concern, partnerships, and making real-world impact.

“Together, we’ll harness Agentic AI to redefine industries and position MLAI Digital as an innovation leader,” Devender added.

Media Contact:

MLAI Digital Private Limited

Email: headit@mlaitech.io

Website: www.mlaidigital.com

(ADVERTORIAL DISCLAIMER: The above press release has been provided by VMPL. ANI will not be responsible in any way for the content of the same)

(This content is sourced from a syndicated feed and is published as received. The Tribune assumes no responsibility or liability for its accuracy, completeness, or content.)





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