Zitec

We spent last Thursday in Amsterdam at the AI-themed Leaders in Finance Events, and left with plenty to think about. One observation stayed with us the longest: 80 to 90% of AI projects in financial services never make it from pilot to production. 🤔

Yorick Naeff, Head of Innovation at ABN AMRO, spent years building and scaling Bux as a fintech before it was acquired by ABN AMRO in 2024.

He identified data as the single most underestimated factor in successful AI deployment.

💡 Invest in data foundations first. AI ambitions will fail without clean, accessible, orchestrated data.

Because of the double-edged dynamic in large corporations that hold enormous volumes of data but must handle legacy architectures and siloed systems, foundational transformation programs have not taken shape yet in banking.

Moreover, many banking services are getting commoditized. Customers, as Naef puts it, do not care about the payment process, they just want to finish the purchase.

💡 Therefore, banks need more and more to develop into technology companies, or find the right partner to scale with, not just because of FOBO \(fear of being obsolete\), but to simply meet their customers' expectations.

If these findings resonate, we have plenty more insights from the sessions, which our expert in the field, Raluca Moldovan , made sure to write down. Let us know in the comments if you'd like to hear more of this.

Hey there! Just in: the greatest, most wholesome news you’ll hear today. 👇

Together with Sameday, we contributed to , a new feature that allows people to donate goods directly through the app, using the SAMEDAY easybox network.

We wanted to make good intentions easier to act on. Now, with over 5,800 lockers becoming donation points, helping has become easy, frictionless, and much more accessible.

For the teams involved, this meant a whole weekend of coding and testing product flows, app logic, integrations, and a lot of small decisions that had to work well together.

If you’re someone who wants to donate: this has become the simplest way to send goods to those who need them. We’ve built it especially for you, the busy human who wishes they had more time and resources to do good. 💙

As for the children receiving them, we hope it means useful things arriving closer, faster, and more abundantly than you’ve ever experienced before.

Thank you to the SAMEDAY team, the Zitec colleagues involved, and everyone who helped bring this to life.

You proved once again that technology can have a real impact when used right. ✊

is now available in the SAMEDAY app.

After hail, heavy rain and a few unpredictable turns, Corporate Regatta 2026 came to an end with a win for the Zitec & Mirro.io crew on Lady Diana.

It wasn’t the easiest race day, but that made the result even more meaningful. In moments like these, the difference comes from the people around you.

Congratulations to everyone on board!

Zitec becomes the first IT company in Romania to be B Corp certified. ✊

The certification is awarded after the B Impact Assessment, a rigorous, international and independently audited evaluation. It looks at how a company supports its employees, contributes to the community, protects the environment and governs itself.

"We built Zitec on a foundation of responsibility and business ethics, reflecting our commitment to making thoughtful decisions every day: from the projects we take on, to the clients we choose to work with." says Simona Lapusan, our Co-CEO and Co-founder.

The movement spans over 10,700 Certified B Corporations across 104 countries and 162 industries, collectively employing more than one million people. Zitec joins as the first Romanian IT company in that network, with the help of Better Business Alliance and Corina Radu.

“We are committed to remaining a company that creates significant positive impact enabled by technology. This certification gives us a solid foundation to continue supporting sustainability and social responsibility, and we hope it can serve as an example for the wider IT industry in Romania,” said Alexandru Lapusan, our Co-CEO and Co-founder.

This news marks the beginning of a new and exciting chapter for us, one that is yet to be announced. Keep an eye out for the good news. It's coming sooner than you think.

GenAI has spent a couple of years impressing everyone by answering questions. The more interesting question for retail now is what happens when AI starts doing. 👀

We're talking about AI as an agent that executes tasks, manages workflows, and works through technical problems on its own. This approach to AI changes what your data infrastructure has to handle.

In the final session of our webinar with Google, their speaker approached this with a live demo.

Agentic AI introduces new and unpredictable traffic patterns, so your data teams have to rearchitect and optimize to keep up.

In turn, this is reshaping how data preparation and cleaning work across BigQuery and the wider ecosystem.

The entire practical session is live now. Don't miss out. Link below. 👇

The ROI of GenAI in Retail & Consumer Goods | Zitec & Google The 2025 ROI of AI in Retail & Consumer Goods - a survey of 585 senior leaders of global enterprises - get the latest insights on AI adoption and reveals the key areas where business value is being realized.

Plenty of retailers are experimenting with AI right now, yet far fewer can point to where it improved the bottom line. The reason catches a lot of teams off guard. 👀

What we've identified as hurdles are:

👉 Misalignment
👉 Risk aversion
👉 The quiet decision paralysis that sets in when nobody wants to own the call

In the second session of our webinar with Google, our Tech Consulting Director, Iulian Oprea, shared three principles that tend to separate the retailers who scale AI from the ones who stay stuck in pilots:

💡 𝐓𝐡𝐞 𝐟𝐢𝐫𝐬𝐭 𝐢𝐬 𝐭𝐨 𝐟𝐢𝐧𝐝 𝐲𝐨𝐮𝐫 𝐟𝐚𝐧𝐚𝐭𝐢𝐜. Rather than transforming the whole company at once, find the people genuinely excited to push through the friction, and hand them real problems to solve.

💡 𝐓𝐡𝐞 𝐬𝐞𝐜𝐨𝐧𝐝 𝐢𝐬 𝐭𝐨 𝐰𝐚𝐭𝐜𝐡 𝐟𝐨𝐫 𝐭𝐡𝐞 𝐂𝐨𝐛𝐫𝐚 𝐞𝐟𝐟𝐞𝐜𝐭. When you reward the wrong things, like lines of code or simple automation, you get the wrong outcomes, so reward the appetite for change and experimentation instead.

💡 𝐓𝐡𝐞 𝐭𝐡𝐢𝐫𝐝 𝐢𝐬 𝐭𝐨 𝐟𝐚𝐜𝐢𝐥𝐢𝐭𝐚𝐭𝐞 𝐝𝐢𝐬𝐜𝐨𝐯𝐞𝐫𝐲 𝐫𝐚𝐭𝐡𝐞𝐫 𝐭𝐡𝐚𝐧 𝐦𝐚𝐧𝐝𝐚𝐭𝐞 𝐢𝐭, because what leadership sees as an opportunity, teams may read as a threat. People commit to what they help build.

This is why AI adoption journeys fail. However, having experience with implementing this technology across industries, we've structured our approach to give you a useful flow to help you succeed.

We call this approach the AI Value Flow, which is a methodology we developed to help you move from isolated pilots to scalable ROI through three phases:

𝐒𝐞𝐭𝐮𝐩 -> 𝐖𝐨𝐫𝐤𝐬𝐡𝐨𝐩 -> 𝐏𝐎𝐂, 𝐭𝐨 𝐩𝐫𝐨𝐯𝐞 𝐯𝐚𝐥𝐮𝐞 𝐟𝐚𝐬𝐭.

Iulian's full session is available now. Comment 'AI' and we'll send it right away.

You have the dashboards, the warehouse, or even the recommendation engine and forecasting model running. So why does the real impact, like the margin gain or the cost saved, keep staying just out of reach? 🤔

It usually comes down to one thing that is easy to miss. The data was built to explain the past, not to predict what happens next.

There is such a thing as having analytics-ready vs. AI-ready data. 👇

Analytics-ready data answers "what happened" by compressing everything into totals and KPIs. AI-ready data answers "what will happen" by expanding that same data into sequences, behavior, and context.

Recently, we've held a webinar with Google about AI in retail, and the findings are worth noting.

In the first session of our webinar with Google, Radu showed how retailers make that move. It starts with the Medallion architecture, structuring data into Bronze, Silver, and Gold layers, and it really takes off when you reach semantic-rich data that understands the customer journey over time, rather than just sales per day.

Adi's full session is available now. Just type 'webinar' in the comment section, and we will send it to you right away. 👇