Meet Aunio, the First AI Audio Production Team Built to Turn Ideas into Production-Ready Audio

Building on NIQ’s GeoPurchase capabilities, the new solution extends geographic purchase intelligence into digital-first categories across Europe

At HUAWEI CONNECT 2026, Leo Chen, Huawei’s Senior Vice President and President of Enterprise Sales, announced the new SCALE partner support system during his “Scaling All Intelligence for Industry Success” keynote address. Huawei intends to use this new system to equip partners with the capabilities they need to help customers move intelligent transformation from individual pilots to large-scale adoption. Chen also shared new insights and practices Huawei has developed on intelligent industry benchmarks.

Chen stated, “The intelligent era is approaching fast. Huawei works with partners to provide products and solutions that solve real business problems. We want to share our own capabilities with partners. By empowering partners, they can bring their unique strengths to bear, and help customers move from compute construction to intelligent application. Huawei is fully committed to helping our customer-centric ‘Huawei + Partners’ collaboration system thrive. We want to help partners solve customer issues more efficiently and help customers achieve large-scale AI adoption.”

Partners face five challenges when scaling intelligent industry projects: solution development, integration verification, solution delivery, O&M, and system collaboration. To help partners overcome these challenges, the SCALE partner support system offers five types of support: Scenario-based Solutions, Co-innovation, Aligned Marketing, Local Services, Consistent Quality, and Efficient Collaboration. These enhanced support offerings provide partners with systematic support from solution development, verification, launch, delivery, and operations, helping them move from benchmark intelligent projects to large-scale AI adoption.

Scenario-based Solutions: Huawei provides open, easy-to-integrate AI foundation products that partners can use to rapidly develop new solutions. These products cover compute, storage, networks, security, and data protection, and include the new SMECE and the DCS AI Solution that help partners more efficiently convert their industry know-how into feasible intelligent solutions. Huawei’s partners have used these products to develop more than 100 scenario-based solutions for eight industries that accelerate AI adoption.

Co-innovation: To help partners replicate benchmark experience and validate solution integration more efficiently, Huawei has opened up its reference architectures and verification environments. This includes the reference architectures for 48 high-value scenarios that partners can refer when designing solutions, setting up test environments, developing applications, and performing debugging and verification. Besides, Huawei provides unified interfaces and development and verification tools through its cloud-based OpenLab to make solution more efficient.

Aligned Marketing: Huawei is committed to helping its partners identify customer needs, launch new solutions, and make standout solutions more visible, verifiable, and replicable so customers can quickly find the solutions they want. Huawei has opened up its Market-to-Lead (MTL) process capabilities to partners and worked together to effectively bring customer-facing solutions to market. Huawei has launched solutions alongside partners, showcased standout solutions at Huawei’s booths and exhibition halls, and built industry showcases with customers. These efforts have enabled customers to better understand the value of solutions and actual validation results. Huawei has worked with partners to build more than 130 showcases with customers globally.

Local Service, Consistent Quality: Huawei is expanding and localizing its partner services, so that partners can offer customers the same high-quality service as Huawei. Partners can access the knowledge, tools, expertise, and service experience through Huawei’s O3 Partner Service Enablement Platform. Huawei offers talent development and certification programs for various service roles, which have been used to cultivate more than 50,000 AI professionals over the past 3 years.

Efficient Collaboration: Huawei provides two one-stop intelligent platforms for partners that simplify the way they work with Huawei. These platforms (HUAWEI eFly and HUAWEI ePartner) serve as unified portals that help partners navigate Huawei’s processes, and provide partners with the data they need to carry out one-stop marketing, transaction, and service operations. Partners gain access to the documentation, tools, IT interfaces, and AI-assisted configuration and intelligent Q&A tools, that help make serving customers more efficiently.

Chen said, “In the era of true intelligence, scaling proven practices across industries will allow more companies to thrive. Industrial intelligence is creating unprecedented opportunities, and Huawei wants to work with our customers and partners to deploy successful benchmarks at scale, and bring the benefits of AI to more industries, organizations, and people.”

Five-customer AI agent services advance into actual delivery; CEO reiterates long-term confidence through a previously disclosed US$1.0 million Rule 10b5-1 share purchase plan

Summitas, a leading client engagement platform for family offices, wealth advisors, and other client-facing businesses, today announced that Lori Barnett, Senior Creative Director, has been named a winner in the Marketing Individual (Americas) category at the inaugural WealthBriefing Innovation in Marketing Awards 2026.

The inaugural WealthBriefing Innovation in Marketing Awards celebrate the firms, teams, and individuals demonstrating outstanding creativity, innovation, and excellence in marketing across the global wealth management industry. The program recognizes organizations and professionals setting new standards within their specialist areas, with winners selected by an independent panel of expert judges through a rigorous and impartial process.

Commenting on Lori’s winning this award, Dan Gregerson, Chairman & CEO at Summitas, said:

“Lori has been shaping exceptional products and brands since her early years at Apple and Adobe, and we’ve had the extraordinary good fortune to have her as a founding member of Summitas. For nearly two decades, she has defined how our company looks, feels, and communicates — and continually evolved our brand as we’ve grown. Lori is one of the finest people I’ve ever worked with: immensely talented, thoughtful, creative, and uncompromising about quality. I couldn’t be more pleased to see her work recognized with this award. It is richly deserved.”

Stephen Harris, CEO of Clearview Financial Media and publisher of WealthBriefing, congratulated all of this year’s winners and highly commended firms:

“Every category winner and highly commended firm has undergone a rigorous and truly independent judging process and should be immensely proud of their achievement. The launch of the WealthBriefing Innovation in Marketing Awards reflects the growing importance of creativity, strategic thinking, and innovation within the wealth management industry. These awards give organizations and individuals the opportunity to have their work independently recognized, benchmark themselves against their peers, and celebrate outstanding achievements. They now join the wider community of WealthBriefing Award winners recognized across our global awards program.”

Summitas provides a centralized client operating platform that gathers data from multiple sources, including user-generated content, to simplify operations, improve communication, and organize, protect, and share information — all from one place. From the Digital Vault to collaboration tools, private communication, financial information integration, task management, and streamlined workflows, a branded Summitas portal delivers measurable value to family offices, wealth advisors, and other client-facing businesses.

Product-centric delivery helps organizations sustain value beyond individual projects by maintaining ownership, direction, and accountability across the product lifecycle. New insights from Info-Tech Research Group show that AI agents are adding new governance challenges as they increasingly make decisions and execute within product workflows, sometimes without explicit human authorization. The firm’s Make the Case for Product Delivery blueprint offers a five-step approach to help leaders define product for their context, map human and agent decision authority, and build a stakeholder-ready roadmap for the transition.

Many IT organizations are still structured to deliver initiatives within defined periods, even though the products and services those initiatives support must continue to evolve and deliver value long after a project ends. Recent findings from Info-Tech Research Group show that moving toward product-centric delivery requires organizations to establish a shared definition of product, clear ownership, decision authority, and stakeholder support. The global research and advisory firm’s Make the Case for Product Delivery blueprint brings these elements together while addressing an emerging governance challenge as AI agents increasingly participate in product decisions.

Info-Tech’s research emphasizes that projects can continue to fund and implement defined changes within a product-centric model, while ongoing product ownership preserves direction, prioritization, and accountability across the full lifecycle. As AI agents become more involved in product workflows, that accountability must also extend to the decisions agents make or influence, including who authorized the decision, who can override it, and who remains accountable for the outcome.

“Projects deliver change. Product ownership sustains the value,” says Hans Eckman, research fellow at Info-Tech Research Group. “In today’s agent-enabled environments, clear ownership is even more critical. Teams need to know what an agent is authorized to do, when a human needs to approve or intervene, and who remains accountable for the result.”

Key Insights for Product Delivery Leaders
Info-Tech’s resource identifies several key considerations for leaders when building the case for product-centric delivery:

• Product delivery connects temporary change to continuous value: Projects can continue to fund and deliver product changes, while ongoing product ownership maintains direction, prioritization, and accountability as products evolve over time.
• Product ownership establishes accountability for value: Clear ownership helps keep product decisions and tradeoffs aligned with organizational goals. In agent-enabled environments, that accountability extends to decisions AI agents make or influence on the team’s behalf.
• Silent delegation can hide AI-influenced product decisions: As agents participate in discovery, prioritization, experimentation, delivery, and support, decisions can occur without explicit human authorization or intervention. Leaders need visibility into where agents make recommendations or execute and who has authority to approve, override, or remain accountable for the outcome.

Info-Tech’s Five-Step Approach to Building the Case for Product Delivery
The Make the Case for Product Delivery blueprint guides product owners, product managers, development team leads, portfolio managers, and business analysts through five steps, with data, platform, and AI/ML stakeholders involved where agent participation and governance need to be assessed:

1. Define product by establishing a shared definition across the organization and distinguishing product delivery from project delivery. Where AI agents are involved, leaders also determine whether an agent is part of a product, a product itself, or a delivery mechanism, as each classification carries different accountability implications.
2. Define drivers and goals by connecting pain points and root causes in the current delivery model to the outcomes the transition should achieve. For agent-enabled product work, this includes establishing explicit goals for governing AI-influenced decisions.
3. Recognize AI and agent participation in product decisions by mapping where AI tools and agents make recommendations or execute across product workflows. Teams flag decision points where human approval, a known authorization ownership, override paths, or outcome accountability are unclear.
4. Communicate what comes next by identifying the critical steps required to advance product-centric delivery and organizing them into a now-next-later roadmap. Where agents participate in product workflows, the roadmap can also sequence actions such as mapping agent decision points, defining delegation boundaries, and integrating agent governance into the product operating model.
5. Make the case to stakeholders by clarifying each stakeholder’s role in the transition, defining what the product team needs from them, and translating the findings into a stakeholder-ready proposal. In agent-enabled environments, this can include stakeholders such as data owners, platform teams, and AI/ML teams responsible for configuring and operating agents.

The blueprint includes a supporting workbook and presentation template as well as practical outputs such as a Human-Agent Decision Map and a now-next-later roadmap. Together, these resources help leaders define how product-centric delivery will operate within their organization, surface gaps in agent decision governance, establish clear accountability, and build a practical case for moving forward.

For exclusive and timely commentary from Info-Tech’s experts, including Hans Eckman, and access to the complete Make the Case for Product Delivery blueprint, please contact pr@infotech.com.

More than 600 industry leaders will gather for conversations featuring leaders from Sunrun, General Motors, IBM, Apollo, and J.P. Morgan Asset Management

ESG messaging now influences B2B procurement as buyers look beyond sustainability claims for measurable evidence, compliance readiness, and supplier trust. 

There is now a definite structural shift in the way B2B customers approach vendor acquisitions. Traditionally, buyers and procurement teams assessed vendors on the basis of utilitarian metrics that included price, performance, and contract SLA terms. Supply chains are under the microscope as buyers tighten audits around regulation, carbon targets, and sustainability.

This has made sustainability evolve from just a corporate social responsibility metric to a more fundamental customer acquisition metric for B2Bs. The fact that B2Bs are now finding that their growth pipelines depend on how well they can make their ESG cases shows that winning markets today is more about making a paradigm shift than anything else. Sustainable marketing is now less about spreading positive vibes and more about constructing data-backed narrative frameworks.

Table of Contents:
The Compliance-Driven Procurement Paradigm
Why Surface-Level Marketing Fails the Diligence Test
The Second-Order Effects of Value-Aligned Acquisition
From Rhetoric to Revenue Architecture

The Compliance-Driven Procurement Paradigm

The driving factor behind this change has been the development and implementation of global sustainability frameworks and regulations. These have turned the scrutiny of supply chains into an inevitable fact. Sustainability has ceased to be just a question of ethics for corporate buyers; they are now legally responsible for the Scope 3 emissions and labor practices of their vendors.

Consequently, vendor evaluations now feature dense, mandatory ESG criteria. A tech platform or manufacturing vendor with a vague, unquantifiable commitment to “green practices” is increasingly viewed as an operational liability. The role of ESG marketing in modern customer acquisition has shifted from a brand reputation mechanism into a hard commercial gatekeeper. Organizations unable to map their environmental efficiencies directly into the procurement metrics of their prospects face systematic exclusion during early-stage RFPs.

This regulatory pressure disrupts long-standing sales assumptions. For decades, B2B marketing operated under the belief that purchasing decisions are driven purely by individual executive stakeholders or immediate ROI. The contemporary reality is that purchasing decisions are tightly bound to strict corporate risk mitigation.

Why Surface-Level Marketing Fails the Diligence Test

Many enterprise leaders continue to underestimate the sophistication required in this new market environment. The market has grown deeply cynical of superficial “greenwashing”, broad assertions of carbon-neutrality, or generic imagery of diverse workspaces.

B2B buyers approach vendor selection with the rigor of financial auditors. When an enterprise evaluates how companies use sustainability messaging to build brand trust, they are not looking for aspirational blog posts; they are searching for verifiable provenance, third-party certifications, and auditable metrics.

[Traditional B2B Messaging] ──> Broad Promises ──> Procurement Rejection (Risk)

│

(Market Shift)

▼

[Modern ESG Messaging]      ──> Auditable Data ──> Strategic Trust (Acquisition)

True organizational trust is built at the intersection of transparency and data integrity. If a SaaS provider claims to optimize client operations sustainably, they must explicitly prove the energy efficiency profiles of their data centers. If a logistics firm pitches an eco-friendly supply chain, they must supply the granular carbon-accounting models to back it up.

When organizations deploy precise, transparent documentation, they achieve a double victory: they eliminate friction for the buyer’s compliance team while transforming ESG messaging from a cost center into a definitive competitive advantage.

The Second-Order Effects of Value-Aligned Acquisition

As this trend matures, it triggers complex second-order effects across organizations, particularly by forcing a structural convergence between Chief Sustainability Officers, product engineering teams, and Go-To-Market (GTM) leaders. Sustainable growth cannot be manufactured by the marketing department in isolation.

• Product Development Integration: GTM teams must collaborate deeply with product architects to extract hard operational metrics, such as lifecycle assessments and raw material tracing, and translate them directly into buyer-facing value propositions.
• Proactive Market Positioning: Companies that master this synthesis reap a profound commercial reward: they command structural pricing premiums. Buyers are demonstrably willing to pay more for vendors who actively derisk their regulatory compliance pipeline.
• Exposure of Laggards:Conversely, the organizations most exposed to this shift are legacy providers relying entirely on historical relationship equity or raw cost dominance. If a vendor’s operational model remains a black box of unquantified environmental impact, no amount of sales alignment or discounting will save it from being designed out of modern enterprise ecosystems.

From Rhetoric to Revenue Architecture

For organizations to flourish within an economic landscape where accountability is paramount, there needs to be a fundamental restructuring of the way these businesses speak to the value that they deliver. The shift to sustainable customer acquisition requires business leaders to go from general defense of themselves to aggressive positioning of value through data.

The future of B2B leadership goes to the businesses that embrace sustainability as an operational practice. Incorporating validated ESG results into the very customer journey of a business means not only being compliant but building the kind of institutional trust needed to establish market share into the next decade.

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Recently, LongHu, the century-old brand under Shanghai Zhonghua Pharmaceutical Co., Ltd., joined forces with Eastday to launch a brand revitalization initiative aimed at bringing new vitality to the time-honored Chinese brand through cross-industry collaborations, creative content and innovative consumer experiences.

The initiative began at a coffee culture festival, where LongHu attracted widespread attention with its unconventional “LongHu Medicated Oil Coffee.” The creation quickly captured the attention of younger consumers, generating over a million impressions, drawing significant foot traffic and becoming a widely discussed topic across social media platforms.

On May 7, LongHu reached another milestone with the launch event for “Shen Long Huo Hu II,” a co-branded product collaboration between LongHu and Shanghai Shenhua Football Club. The crossover introduced new products that preserve LongHu’s classic herbal heritage while incorporating a younger, more contemporary and stylish expression.

On September 17, the “Shen Long Huo Hu II Energy Recharge Pop-Up Store” opened for a seven-day run, featuring a continuous lineup of activities. Through immersive experiences, interactive check-ins and limited-time experiences, the pop-up gives consumers an opportunity to experience LongHu’s innovative appeal up close.

At the same time, LongHu has partnered with the Shanghai High School Football League to create an AI-powered short drama, connecting the spirit of sports with the spirit of the brand through technology-driven storytelling. Together, these initiatives form part of LongHu’s broader brand revitalization efforts.

From a cup of LongHu Medicated Oil Coffee to a new product launch, and from a pop-up store to an AI-powered short drama, LongHu is building on the wisdom of traditional Chinese herbal culture while embracing cross-industry innovation. Through these initiatives, the brand is presenting overseas markets with a renewed image of a time-honored Chinese brand that is becoming younger and more international. Looking ahead, LongHu will continue to collaborate with partners to bring new vitality to its century-old heritage and expand its presence on the global stage.

Today, SellYourWay.org announces the launch of a new, dynamic feature on their website, defining the Certified Business Intermediary^® (CBI) designation. This interactive tool educates small business owners on the advantages of working with these highly qualified and ethical Business Brokers when preparing to sell their business. This new resource emphasizes the benefits of selecting a CBI^® — a professional who has met educational and performance requirements — and remains committed to ongoing education on industry trends, standards, and best practices. SellYourWay.org is a website for small business owners powered by The International Business Brokers Association^® (IBBA), the largest international not-for-profit association for business brokers.

When a small business owner sells a business, the very-best representation comes from a Business Broker who has achieved the Certified Business Intermediary^® (CBI) designation.

The new, interactive feature on sellyourway.org breaks the designation down into six qualifications that business owners should look for in their Business Broker:

• Active IBBA^® Members — A CBI^® must be a member in good standing of the International Business Brokers Association^® (IBBA).
• The Most-Educated Business Brokers in the Industry — To earn the CBI^® designation, brokers must complete a total of 68 credit hours of specialized education, including coursework in Professional Ethics and Standards, Business Brokerage or Mergers & Acquisitions, and Legal Aspects of Business Brokerage or Mergers & Acquisitions.
• Experts in Valuation, Pricing & Recasting — CBI^®s are required to complete a three-course Recasting & Pricing Summit on business valuation, covering methods including the Direct Market Data Method, Capitalization of Benefits Income Method, Excess Earnings Method and Multiple of Discretionary Earnings Method.
• Annual IBBA^® Conference Attendees — Industry-leading courses, workshops and seminars at the Annual IBBA^® conferences provide insights on the latest market conditions and trends in the valuation, sale and marketing of businesses.
• Successful in Passing the CBI^® Exam — Once CBI^® candidates have met all of their education requirements and passed the exams demonstrating their proficiency in each course, they can sit for the CBI^® exam, which they must pass with a 70% rate or higher.
• Experienced Sell-Side Business Brokers — To achieve the CBI^® designation, candidates must submit three deals for approval as the lead seller broker. To retain the CBI^® designation, educational and performance requirements must be met every three years.

These rigorous education, examination and experience requirements help ensure CBI^®s stay current on the latest market trends — giving business owners greater confidence when choosing a qualified professional to value, market and sell their businesses.

“For most business owners, selling their businesses is a once-in-a-lifetime event. Working with a CBI^® ensures that the entire process — from valuation to negotiation to final sale — is executed with expertise and integrity. This partnership not only improves the odds of a successful close, but also provides sellers with peace of mind, knowing that an experienced professional is guiding them through every step of the transaction.” – Emily Bowler, Executive Director, IBBA