BlueFocus CEO Fei Pan on Reinventing the Company for the AI Era

What BlueFocus's latest results suggest about AI-led reinvention, Globalization 2.0, and the reshaping of the agency business

BEIJING, April 24, 2026 /PRNewswire/ -- On April 15, BlueFocus released its 2025 annual results together with a letter to investors from CEO Fei Pan. The company reported revenue of USD 10.07 billion, up 12.99% year on year, while AI-driven revenue rose to USD 546.05 million, an increase of 210.42%. Taken together, the earnings release and the investor letter suggest that BlueFocus is entering a new phase in its AI transition—one in which AI is being framed less as a narrative layer and more as part of the company's emerging business infrastructure.

That is the more consequential signal in the latest disclosure. Three years after launching its "All in AI" strategy, BlueFocus is no longer framing AI only as a future-oriented ambition. It is increasingly linking AI to revenue contribution, product buildout, workflow redesign, and a wider effort to reposition the company for a more automated and globally distributed marketing environment. In BlueFocus CEO Fei Pan's description, that shift demands more than incremental optimization. It requires "self-reinvention, the spirit of starting over, and the ambition to become a new kind of AI company."

From AI narrative to operating leverage

AI is beginning to challenge the traditional agency model in more structural ways. Content production is becoming faster and cheaper, media decisioning is increasingly automated, and parts of the historical value chain built on labor-intensive execution are under pressure. For large marketing groups, the question is no longer whether to adopt AI tools, but how deeply AI will reshape the business itself.

BlueFocus's response has been to push beyond tool adoption and toward a broader repositioning. As the company approaches its 30th anniversary, management is framing this period less as another technology upgrade and more as a transition point—one in which BlueFocus is trying to rebuild itself as a more AI-driven marketing technology company. Rather than relying only on third-party tools or surface-level integrations, it has chosen a heavier path, investing in its own underlying systems and product stack.

In 2025, the company's AI-related R&D spending, including personnel costs, was about USD 26.387 million. At the center of that push is BlueAI, a multimodal marketing platform that management describes as a core engine for the company's AI transition. Building on this, BlueFocus has built a clearer product stack: STARUNION AI on the influencer marketing side, AdsWin for ad buying and optimization, and Xinying creative platform for content production. The significance of this portfolio goes beyond the presence of several AI-branded products. The more important question is whether those systems are beginning to change how work is produced, delivered, and monetized.

That is where the 2025 numbers become more relevant. BlueFocus reported AI-driven revenue of USD 546.05 million, up 210.42% year over year. It also said total token consumption exceeded one trillion for the year, suggesting that AI usage within the company has moved beyond experimentation and into scaled deployment. These figures matter less as vanity metrics than as early signs that AI is moving closer to monetization and workflow penetration. In other words, BlueFocus is not only saying that it uses AI; it is trying to show that AI is beginning to influence revenue contribution, internal production logic, and the structure of service delivery.

This is the key distinction. The company's ambition extends beyond surface-level AI enablement. It is to move toward something closer to AI Native marketing infrastructure: a system in which campaign execution, media decisions, content production, and internal collaboration are increasingly organized around automation, self-learning systems, and machine-assisted decision-making. That is a much broader proposition than simply adopting tools and a much harder one to deliver. But it is precisely this shift that gives BlueFocus's current transition its strategic significance. As Pan frames it, the longer-term goal is "to systematically reconstruct BlueFocus's existing business with AI Native methods so that every business scenario becomes AI-driven."

Globalization 2.0: reworking the business behind overseas growth

A second major strategic theme in BlueFocus's latest disclosures is what the company calls Globalization 2.0. For several years, overseas business has been one of its main commercial engines. In 2025, outbound advertising placement reached USD 8.282 billion, accounting for more than 80% of total revenue. But at this stage, the more important issue is not scale alone. The more important question now is whether that scale can translate into a healthier mix of revenue and margins over time.

That is what gives Globalization 2.0 its significance. The traditional outbound media-buying model can generate substantial top-line volume, but it also comes with structural margin constraints: policies at major platforms are increasingly transparent, bargaining power is limited, and gross margins remain under pressure. BlueFocus's response is not to step away from that model, but to move beyond it—shifting the focus from volume alone to the business structure needed to support future growth.

The logic is clearest in the company's "5-3-2" framework. Management's longer-term vision is for 50% of outbound business to come from the leading platforms, 30% from mid-tier media platforms, and 20% from self-built traffic and technology platforms such as Blue X and Blue Turbo. Read this way, Globalization 2.0 is not just an overseas growth strategy. It is an attempt to rebalance the business behind overseas growth and build a more diversified profit mix over time.

The company's overseas office strategy fits the same pattern. BlueFocus says it has already established seven overseas offices and plans to expand that footprint to roughly 10 to 20 over time, covering regions including Southeast Asia, Latin America, Europe, and the United States. The point is not simply geographic reach. It is to make overseas growth more localized, more operationally embedded, and less dependent on platform access alone.

As Pan puts it, "AI and globalization are increasingly intertwined." In cross-border business, AI offers natural advantages in language, localization, and scalability, which helps explain why BlueFocus sees global markets as an important proving ground for AI Native business models. In that sense, Globalization 2.0 is not only about reworking the profit structure behind overseas growth, but also about creating a more immediate commercial context for the company's AI ambitions.

AI transformation is more than a technical question

A notable feature of BlueFocus's current strategy is that it treats AI transformation as an organizational challenge, not just a technical one. For all the emphasis on automation, the company is also making the case that adoption depends on talent, adaptability, and a willingness to relearn how work gets done.

That logic is visible in how management describes internal experimentation. BlueFocus says it allows employees to use leading global AI tools with reimbursed expenses and no preset cap. In a recent interview, Pan noted that the highest individual reimbursement last year exceeded USD 43,978. The significance of that detail lies less in the amount itself than in what it signals about the company's approach: lowering friction around adoption, encouraging experimentation, and treating AI learning as an operating priority rather than a side initiative.

As Pan puts it, "We are reconstructing BlueFocus into a truly AI Native organization." That ambition extends beyond tools to talent standards, incentives, and culture. Internally, the company is elevating "AI Native+AI First" as guiding benchmarks, suggesting that the transition is being framed as a broader organizational reset rather than just a technology upgrade in how the organization hires, evaluates, and works.

Just as important, BlueFocus does not frame AI as a substitute for people. The more durable point in management's messaging is that while AI may reshape workflows, the long-term performance still depends on talent quality, decision-making, and organizational adaptability. In that sense, the company is presenting AI transformation as much a management and organizational story as a technological one.

The same logic also helps explain BlueFocus's external investment strategy. The company says it has invested in six AI Native companies, not primarily as a financial exercise, but as a way to stay close to frontier capability development. In strategic terms, that suggests a company trying to keep its transformation synchronized with the fastest-moving parts of the ecosystem rather than relying only on internal roadmaps. In Pan's view, "We need to find the fastest-moving AI Native companies and stay close to them, remain in sync with the industry's most advanced capabilities. That in itself is one of the ways BlueFocus accelerates its own transformation."

What BlueFocus is now trying to establish goes further than demonstrating that it has embraced AI. The underlying message is that AI is becoming increasingly inseparable from the business itself. Pan's view that there should no longer be a meaningful distinction between AI and non-AI business is perhaps the clearest expression of that ambition. This is not a finished transformation story. But BlueFocus is beginning to show that this shift is no longer just strategic rhetoric; it is starting to take shape in how the business is built and run.

Note to editors: 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