BlueFocus CEO Fei Pan on Re-Architecting Marketing Around AI
BEIJING, April 27, 2026 /PRNewswire/ -- For BlueFocus, AI is no longer a layer of efficiency. It is becoming a test of what kind of company the business can become.
The company's 2025 annual report, released last week, reported revenue of USD 10.07 billion, AI-driven revenue of USD 546.05 million, and total token usage of more than one trillion. BlueFocus's global outbound media buying business remained its largest revenue engine, generating USD 8.28 billion and accounting for 82.25% of total revenue. AI-driven revenue, while growing rapidly, accounted for 5.42% of the total.
Those numbers describe a company in transition rather than one claiming the transition is complete. BlueFocus is still anchored in a large outbound marketing business. What Pan is outlining is a different question: whether AI is beginning to change how the company operates, how it allocates work, and eventually how it earns.
In a letter to investors released alongside the annual report, Pan wrote that BlueFocus had already moved beyond "the shallow stage of using AI tools simply to cut costs and improve efficiency" and had "moved into the stage of using truly AI Native methods to reconstruct our business, build new models, build new organizations, and create new intelligence capable of autonomous decision-making."
That claim rests on a specific operating view of AI adoption. Pan argues that the most useful signal is not the number of AI case studies a company publishes or the number of wrapper products it launches, but the depth at which AI is embedded in the workflow. "Token volume does not lie," he wrote. "It is the most honest starting indicator of whether AI has truly entered the business process."
BlueFocus says that process is already visible across core tasks tied to client delivery and revenue generation. In the investor letter, Pan wrote that AI is now used in social media insights, creator analysis, advertising risk control, winning-creative extraction, intelligent budget adjustment, and video content production. In 2025, Blue AI completed 146 million agent-to-agent collaborative tasks. Across most core operating scenarios, including strategy formulation, budget allocation, and delivery decisions, the company said AI outperformed humans without manual intervention in 85 percent of relevant use cases.
For BlueFocus, that is where the real business significance begins. The company is not presenting AI as an incremental layer on top of an unchanged service model. It is using AI to push more work into repeatable, increasingly autonomous systems. In Pan's words, "When AI can trace back through its execution process, evaluate the quality of its own output, and proactively adjust its next move, it is no longer just a tool being called. It becomes a genuinely evolving, intelligent, end-to-end system."
That distinction also shapes how BlueFocus defines its newer revenue base. The company described AI-driven revenue as business generated with minimal human input, high levels of automation, greater gross margin potential, and business models that allow data to be accumulated, annotated, iterated, and continuously learned from. By that definition, AI-driven revenue reached USD 546.05 million in 2025. It remains a minority share of total revenue, but management is using it as an indicator of where the company wants the next layer of growth to come from.
The effort extends beyond products and platforms into the company's internal structure. BlueFocus said it has built a talent base of nearly 500 AI professionals, including more than 350 people in product and technology-related roles and more than 150 who connect business and technology. The company has also introduced an AI Business Partner mechanism to push AI capability into each business line. In 2025, investment in AI-related technical talent reached USD 13.96 million, up 76.52% year over year.
What BlueFocus is testing, in effect, is whether a company built on large-scale client service can rewire itself around AI without losing the scale of its underlying business. That makes the global outbound side of the company especially important.
According to the investor letter, more than 80 percent of BlueFocus's revenue and more than half of its profit now come from global outbound business. In 2025, revenue from global outbound media buying reached USD 8.28 billion. The company said its three major strategic media partners, Meta, Google, and TikTok for Business, all delivered year-over-year advertising revenue growth, while relationships with newer partners including AppLovin, Uber Ads, and Netflix continued to expand.
BlueFocus is also expanding its local operating footprint. The company currently operates seven overseas offices and expects that number to rise to more than ten in 2026. Offices in Singapore, Vietnam, Thailand, and Indonesia have developed quickly, with more than two already entering the stage of scaled profitability. Management says the next phase of Globalization 2.0 is intended to change not only where BlueFocus operates, but also how the business generates profit, with a greater contribution expected from mid-tier media partners and from self-built traffic and technology platforms such as Blue X and Blue Turbo.
Pan's argument is that these two tracks, AI and globalization, are becoming harder to separate. In the investor letter, he wrote that AI and globalization are "like twin brothers" and suggested that the first durable AI-native business models may emerge in cross-border business scenarios, where language, localization, and execution complexity create a natural need for AI-led systems.
That is still a thesis in progress, and BlueFocus's own numbers make clear how early it remains. The company's revenue base is still dominated by outbound media buying. Its AI-driven revenue, while growing quickly, is still relatively small in proportion to the whole. The significance of the current moment lies elsewhere: BlueFocus is giving the market a way to evaluate the transition through operating evidence rather than rhetoric alone.
Pan put the ambition directly in the investor letter: "What we want to create is not an old company with higher efficiency, but a new BlueFocus built for the future." Whether that ambition produces a different kind of economics will take time to prove. What BlueFocus has already done is define the terms on which it wants to be judged.
About BlueFocus
BlueFocus is a China-based marketing communications and technology company. Its core businesses include global outbound marketing, full-service campaign services, and AI-driven marketing platforms. The company said it is focused on integrating AI more deeply into operating workflows while expanding its overseas business footprint.
Translations of certain RMB amounts into U.S. dollars in this release are provided solely for the convenience of the reader and are based on an exchange rate of USD 1.00 = RMB 6.8216.
SOURCE BlueFocus
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