Branded AI assistant brings everyday business activities into messaging channels, reducing the need for separate software and specialist teams

DUBAI, UAE, Oct. 20, 2026 /PRNewswire/ — Loyyal today unveiled the Perxi AI Business Suite, enabling small and medium enterprises (SMEs) to manage everyday business activities through WhatsApp. Building on its introduction as a loyalty assistant, Perxi brings commerce, customer engagement and business management into one conversational interface, with capabilities including ordering, customer service and loyalty.

The suite helps SMEs and direct-to-consumer brands manage these activities without purchasing separate ordering systems, customer relationship management software or support tools. Its conversational approach reduces the need to hire specialists or train employees to operate multiple systems.

“Small business owners should be able to focus on growth without assembling a collection of software tools,” said Ashish Kumar Singh, Founder and CEO of Loyyal.

“Perxi brings everyday business capabilities into WhatsApp under each business’s own brand. We want to make these tools affordable and accessible while helping businesses retain greater control over their customer relationships, data and decisions.”

Perxi provides the underlying technology, while each business launches its assistant under its own brand name. Customers engage directly with the business they recognise, rather than entering a separate Perxi marketplace.

Customers can place orders, ask questions, receive assistance and access rewards within a familiar conversation. There is no additional branded application to install or separate login to remember. This approach is designed to appeal to younger consumers accustomed to discovering and interacting with brands through mobile messaging.

Beyond WhatsApp, Perxi can be deployed across messaging channels suited to each business and market, including Instagram, WeChat and KakaoTalk.
Multilingual capabilities enable businesses to serve customers in their preferred languages, supporting brands operating beyond English and those engaging diverse communities.

As conversational commerce and AI assistants become more prominent, SMEs face growing expectations for convenient, responsive interactions. Bringing business services into messaging channels offers a way to meet those expectations while building direct customer relationships.

Marketplaces and aggregators offer a fast route to market, but access to customer information and engagement opportunities varies. Perxi helps businesses establish a direct channel and gain insights from their own customer conversations and transactions.

These insights can inform service improvements, personalised engagement and retention, while reducing dependence on intermediaries for customer access.

Pricing is designed to remain simple and affordable. Loyyal plans further services under the same umbrella.

Perxi will return to exhibit at Dubai AI Festival on October 26–27, 2026, at Dubai World Trade Centre.

About Loyyal

Loyyal is a US-born, UAE-based enterprise technology company helping businesses turn loyalty and customer engagement into growth and revenue. Combining patented blockchain technology with AI, its modular portfolio spans loyalty management, rewards, points exchange, offers, gift cards, gamification and conversational business assistants.

Media Contact

Marketingdepartment@loyyal.com

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WARRINGTON, England, Oct. 20, 2026 /PRNewswire/ — Six in ten retailers, wholesalers and manufacturers are worried about their supply chains and expect rising sourcing and transport costs over the next year. The right kind of AI could ease that pressure, according to experts. But adoption in these sectors lags behind the rest of the UK economy, and fewer businesses there say AI is actually improving how they operate.

AI use among UK businesses has climbed to 34.7% as of June 2026, according to Office for National Statistics data. Manufacturing sits at 26.9%, while the wholesale and retail sector sits at 28.4%. The industries that keep Britain’s shops stocked and factories running have adopted AI more slowly than the country as a whole.

Inefficient supply chains are one of several drivers of rising prices, and part of the cost tends to land on the shopper. AI built for forecasting could ease some of that pressure, according to Sigrún Gunnhildardóttir, CPO at AGR Inventory, a company providing demand forecasting and inventory planning software to wholesalers, retailers and manufacturers.

“A lot of it comes down to reactive procurement, paying a premium for expedited freight and emergency safety stock because the shortage wasn’t forecast. It’s a real driver of margin compression, and some of it shows up in the price consumers pay,” says Sigrún.

Nationally, close to 59% of businesses using AI say it’s improving their operations, the single most common reason given. In manufacturing, wholesale and retail, that figure drops to around 47%, roughly 12 points behind the national average, despite these being the sectors where operational tools like forecasting and inventory planning could counteract rising prices.

“Looking at the numbers, most of what’s been adopted in these sectors won’t help anyone decide how much stock to order,” says Sigrún.

Mostly free, mostly for content

Businesses in wholesale and retail are more likely than the national average to have adopted AI through free software, and manufacturers are noticeably less likely to buy dedicated tools. Among the AI these sectors do use, text and visual content creation are the most common applications. Data processing, the type of AI behind demand forecasting, trails well behind, according to the ONS figures.

Share of all businesses

Share of AI-using businesses

Source: ONS Business Insights and Conditions Survey, Wave 159, 15 to 28 June 2026

“Off-the-shelf models have no visibility of stock positions, supplier lead times or demand history. Without that context, they can’t support a replenishment decision. And businesses need to be able to see what data an AI recommendation is based on, rather than simply being given an answer,” says Sigrún.

Businesses already know what they’re missing

Forecasting is the AI capability in highest demand among the manufacturers, wholesalers and retailers AGR works with, rated above every other option the company has asked about. The type of AI it relies on, advanced data processing and modeling, are among the least adopted in these sectors, according to the ONS figures.

“When our clients tell us what they want from AI, forecasting comes first. They want earlier warning on demand shifts, anomalies and the effect of promotions, so they can plan replenishment around it,” says Sigrún.

With six in ten of those concerned about their supply chains expecting sourcing and transport costs to rise over the next year, the gap between what these businesses want from AI and what they’ve adopted could become costly.

“These businesses want AI, and they’re under pressure on costs. But they don’t just want more AI. They want tools that understand their operational data, show them how recommendations are reached and leave them in control of the final decision. That’s very different from simply giving employees access to a general purpose AI tool,” says Sigrún.

Methodology

The sector-level figures on AI adoption, technology type, adoption method and purpose are taken from the industry breakdowns in the Office for National Statistics’ Business Insights and Conditions Survey (BICS), Wave 159 (15 to 28 June 2026).

Supply chain cost figures are drawn from BICS Wave 163 (17 to 30 August 2026) and are shares of businesses that reported concerns about their supply chains.

BICS excludes agriculture, energy, public administration, public health and education, and financial services, so its coverage reflects the UK’s private trading economy.

Customer insights are drawn from a survey of 50 members of AGR Inventory’s customer panel, conducted in July and August 2026 among retailers, wholesalers and manufacturers. More than half of respondents were supply chain decision makers. Respondents rated six AI-enabled capabilities for their value on a scale of 1 to 5.

Contact information

Randi W. Stebbins, Head of Communication
randi@agrinventory.com
AGR

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With this new partnership, Rafay and Lenovo will initiate joint sales alignment to help companies orchestrate and monetize enterprise AI and cloud-native workloads across the Americas, EMEA and APAC 

SUNNYVALE, Calif., Oct. 20, 2026 /PRNewswire/ — Rafay Systems, the infrastructure orchestration and monetization platform for enterprise AI and cloud-native workloads, today announced it has joined Lenovo AI Innovators, Lenovo’s ecosystem of AI software providers and industry solutions. Rafay and Lenovo will bring the Rafay Platform to customers deploying Lenovo AI infrastructure, and the two companies have initiated joint sales alignment across the Americas, EMEA and APAC.

AI infrastructure spend is shifting from acquiring GPU capacity to operating it as a service. With that, neoclouds, sovereign AI clouds, telcos and enterprises all face the same gap between installing GPUs and delivering a usable service to customers. Closing that gap takes multi-tenant isolation, quota enforcement, self-service portals, and usage metering, which most teams would otherwise have to build themselves. Rafay provides that orchestration and monetization layer for Lenovo infrastructure, the AI control plane Lenovo sees as critical to running hybrid AI across on-premises, hosted private AI and neocloud environments. It covers GPU and Kubernetes lifecycle management, SKU management, and AI Token Factory, which delivers models as token-metered inference APIs.

Rafay and Lenovo already share multiple customers globally, with Sharon AI – a publicly traded neocloud based in Australia that runs on Lenovo infrastructure and uses Rafay to orchestrate its AI infrastructure – being a preeminent example. The two companies are additionally prosecuting a healthy, joint pipeline of neoclouds and telecommunications companies.

“The hard part of AI infrastructure is operating GPUs as a service: shared safely across tenants, governed by policy, and metered so every GPU hour or token ties back to revenue,” said Rupen Shah, Global AI Ecosystem Partnerships at Rafay Systems. “That operating layer is what Rafay builds. Lenovo customers already rely on Lenovo for the infrastructure, and with Rafay they can run it as a hybrid AI platform, whether they are an enterprise building private AI or a neocloud selling GPU capacity and tokens.”

Lenovo reaches customers through channel partners in more than 180 markets. Learn more at lenovo.com/ai-innovators and rafay.co. 

About Rafay Systems 

Rafay Systems is a leading software provider powering the operators building the AI cloud, including neoclouds, telecommunications providers, enterprises, and sovereign AI operators. The Rafay Platform lets these organizations operationalize GPU and compute infrastructure with self-service automation, governance, and multi-tenancy, spanning bare metal provisioning, infrastructure lifecycle management, virtual machines, Kubernetes, GPU PaaS, AI development environments, and Token Factory for publishing AI models as token-metered inference services. By simplifying orchestration and operations across this stack, Rafay helps operators increase GPU utilization and turn raw infrastructure into monetizable, production-ready AI services, all while maintaining security, consistency, and control. Rafay is a validated partner in the NVIDIA AI Cloud Ready initiative. For more information, visit rafay.co.  

About Lenovo 

Lenovo is a US$83 billion revenue global technology powerhouse, ranked #153 in the Fortune Global 500, and serving millions of customers every day in 180 markets. Guided by its vision of “Smarter Technology for All”, Lenovo is executing a Hybrid AI strategy that spans Personal AI – one personal AI, multiple devices; and Enterprise AI – helping customers turn data into insights and value. This strategy is delivered through the Group’s commitment to world-class innovation and a full-stack AI portfolio, including devices (PCs, workstations, smartphones, tablets, accessories), infrastructure solutions (server, storage, edge, high performance computing and software defined infrastructure), as well as software, solutions, and services. With a global footprint spanning more than 20 research and development locations and a global supply chain that includes more than 30 manufacturing sites across 11 markets, Lenovo is widely recognized for its operational excellence. Lenovo is listed on the Hong Kong stock exchange under Lenovo Group Limited (HKSE: 992) (ADR: LNVGY). 

Media Contact

Rafay Systems
Angela Shugarts
angela@rafay.co

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