Kia and Samsung Partner to Integrate SmartThings Pro into Kia PBVs

-          Kia and Samsung collaborate to enhance the digital ecosystem of Kia's Platform Beyond Vehicles (PBVs) for business
-          Samsung's B2B IoT platform – 'SmartThings Pro' – will be integrated into Kia PBVs for seamless connectivity between vehicles and business environments
-          The 'Plug & Play' business model will allow small business owners to quickly and flexibly customize their PBVs to suit their specific needs
-          Kia and Samsung plan to explore new IoT solutions and global expansion, building on Korea's reputation for smart technology

SEOUL, South Korea and TARRAGONA, Spain, Feb. 27, 2025 /PRNewswire/ -- Kia Corporation has entered into a strategic partnership with Samsung Electronics Co., Ltd. to introduce next-generation 'Internet of Things' (IoT) solutions for its Platform Beyond Vehicles (PBVs) offerings.

The two companies signed a Memorandum of Understanding during Kia's 2025 EV Day in Spain, marking a significant step toward redefining both the 'In-Vehicle' and 'Out-of-Vehicle' experience for PBV customers. 

The signing ceremony was attended by Sangdae Kim, Head of Kia's PBV Division, and Chanwoo Park, Executive Vice President of B2B Integrated Offering Center at Samsung Electronics.

The collaboration aligns with Kia's wider Platform Beyond Vehicle strategy, which seeks to expand the role of PBVs beyond transportation into customized business solutions that can be integrated into broader digital ecosystems.

"Kia PBVs are designed to be more than just vehicles, they are intelligent business solutions that connect seamlessly with digital ecosystems," said Sangdae Kim, Head of Kia's PBV Division. "We anticipate that our business collaboration with Samsung, leveraging its AI B2B solution SmartThings Pro, will extend the vehicle user experience for our business customers beyond PBVs into the broader IoT ecosystem. This partnership is expected to create new opportunities for discovering customer value."

Kia will integrate Samsung's IoT platform, 'SmartThings Pro', into its PBVs, enabling wireless control of connected devices and technologies through a 'Plug & Play' service. This solution allows business customers to integrate and manage IoT-enabled appliances without complex installations, simply by attaching a smart connector.

"By integrating SmartThings Pro into Kia PBV, we plan to present an intelligent new way for businesses to be connected to their customers," said Chanwoo Park, Executive Vice President of B2B Integrated Offering Center at Samsung Electronics. "We will provide an optimized integrated store management experience based on customized solutions to cater for a range of B2B customers including the self-employed and small business owners."

Connectivity between PBVs and business environments

By integrating SmartThings Pro into its PBVs, Kia is enabling automated connectivity between vehicles and business spaces. This integration allows B2B customers to configure business routines, activating the appropriate routine based on the destination entered in the PBV's 'In-Vehicle Infotainment' (IVI). This allows for seamless and secure management and monitoring of external business operations, even while on the road.

Expanding PBV business solutions for global B2B customers

Alongside SmartThings Pro integration, Kia and Samsung plan to develop specialized IoT solutions tailored to the unique needs of PBV business customers across various industries.

The two companies will first launch pilot services for small business owners and self-employed customers as part of this partnership. Moving forward, they will work on developing IoT product lines specifically for PBVs and bundled solutions tailored to the needs of B2B clients. They also aim to create new business models and extend their services to B2B customers globally.

- END -

Kia Corporation – about us 
For more information, visit the Kia Global Media Center at www.kianewscenter.com

** The press release content is from PR Newswire. Bastille Post is not involved in its creation. **

Kia and Samsung Partner to Integrate SmartThings Pro into Kia PBVs

• Innovative technologies enable retailers to implement intelligent stores at scale to deliver smarter, more responsive shopping experiences
• Industry partners to display production-ready AI solutions for loss prevention, digital twins, AI agents, customer analytics, and more

SAN JOSE, Calif. and NEW YORK, Jan. 11, 2026 /PRNewswire/ -- Retail's Big Show -- Super Micro Computer, Inc. (SMCI), a Total IT Solution Provider for AI/ML, HPC, Cloud, Storage, and 5G/Edge, today announced collaboration with technology partners for AI-powered intelligent in-store retail solutions designed to meet increasing customer expectations with scalability, improved productivity and increased profitability.

"AI is reshaping shopping experiences, enabling real-time analysis of video and other data to give retailers actionable insights to optimizing staff efficiency, reducing shrinkage, increasing profits, and avoiding stock-outs," said Charles Liang, president and CEO of Supermicro. "By combining Supermicro's complete and scalable AI platforms with NVIDIA RTX PRO accelerated computing solutions, we're enabling retailers to build intelligent stores that maximize the benefits of AI-driven applications."

According to the latest NVIDIA State of AI in Retail & CPG report, 89% of respondents reported that AI is helping to increase annual revenue, while 95% said it is helping decrease annual costs, highlighting the measurable business impact retailers are already achieving because of AI¹.

For more information, please visit https://www.supermicro.com/en/products/edge/servers

Supermicro Complete and Scalable Edge AI Infrastructure

Retail-centric AI applications require sub-second responsiveness which is only possible, at scale, if data is processed directly at the edge. Supermicro's Edge AI infrastructure enables the deployment of solutions in distributed environments, such as intelligent retail stores and supply chains, to provide a complete solution.

Deploying at the edge presents a myriad of unique challenges in comparison to the data center. Supermicro's broad Edge AI portfolio of products helps customers and partners overcome these challenges while striking the right balance between performance and ROI.

For deployments in harsh environments where conditioned space is not available, the fanless E103 series of products bring AI processing power where it couldn't go before. Supermicro also offers a fanned small form factor E300 series systems with AI capabilities.

When there is a demanding AI workload at the edge, customers and partners can turn to numerous systems capable of holding the latest discrete GPUs for AI acceleration. Ranging from 1U short-depth to larger 4U form factors, solutions can be right-sized to meet the customer's needs by enabling the latest generation of NVIDIA RTX PRO Blackwell series.

Supermicro Intelligent Store Partners

Supermicro is collaborating with ecosystem partners including Everseen, Kinetic Vision, ALLSIDES, LiveX, WobotAI, and Aible, to create intelligent stores that positively impact day-to-day retail operations as well as longer term supply chain management.

• Everseen's Evercheck solution uses Vision AI to help reduce shrink and improve staff productivity and customer experiences. Built on the Everseen Vision AI platform, Evercheck detects, and deters recovery of unwanted behaviors at checkout, helping retailers recover losses and streamline front-of-store operations.

"Everseen has spent years working alongside some of the world's largest retailers, understanding the realities of the store floor and solving loss challenges where they actually happen," said Joe White, CEO of Everseen. "By partnering with Supermicro and leveraging NVIDIA-accelerated computing, Evercheck delivers real-time computer vision at the edge - transforming store activity into intelligence retailers can act on immediately."

• Wobot AI, focused on building Video AI Agents for the physical world, will be demonstrating how the cameras retailers already own can be turned into systems that continuously observe, learn, and produce usable insight. By converting ordinary CCTV infrastructure into autonomous agents that recognize patterns, identify friction, and surface decisions, Wobot's AI Agents enable retailers to improve day-to-day operations with practical and measurable outcomes.

"By working with Supermicro and NVIDIA at the edge, we're able to deploy Video AI Agents in a way that's scalable, reliable, and focused on real-time operational insight—not experimentation," said Will Kelso, President, Revenue & Growth at Wobot AI.

• LiveX AI - "Retail is entering an era where AI agents become the default interaction layer between brands and customers," said Jerry Li, Co-Founder and CEO of LiveX AI. "With NVIDIA's accelerated AI and Supermicro's edge infrastructure, we can deploy a helpful, human-like AI agent directly in physical spaces—such as kiosks or holograms—bringing the speed, intelligence, and continuity of digital experiences into brick-and-mortar environments. This collaboration makes AI agents usable, in real time, where customers actually are."

• • Kinetic Vision and ALLSIDES are bundling their expertise for a True Digital Twin solution designed to develop, test, and optimize supply chain processes, checkout stations, and other complex systems.

"The combination of Supermicro's high reliability optimized infrastructure and NVIDIA's accelerated computing stack gives Kinetic Vision the foundation to innovate at speed. Together, we are helping retailers move from experimentation to production-ready AI solutions that drive measurable operational and customer experience gains," says Jeremy Jarratt, Kinetic Vision CEO.

Franz Tschimben, CEO at ALLSIDES, adds: "Building on the combined strengths of NVIDIA and Supermicro, we deliver a high-fidelity 3D digital twin data layer for AI training that enables retailers to power applications across the entire retail value chain — from training robots with physical AI, to production and production planning, virtual store layouts and consumer feedback systems, and e-commerce integrations — helping drive higher conversion rates, faster decision-making, and greater operational efficiency."

• Supermicro will also feature Superb AI's retail-focused VSS solution, combining Superb AI's proprietary VLM with NVIDIA AI Blueprint components to enable subjective reasoning capabilities, natural-language search, automated incident summarization, and customer behavior insights across store camera networks.
• Aible will highlight its automated agent solution, which analyzes vast amounts of data across millions of patterns to explain changes in retail KPIs, such as the average purchase amount or number of purchases. Aible will also demonstrate how the latest NVIDIA Retail blueprints can be incorporated into agentic solutions that automatically customize customer experiences and optimize retail operations at scale.

Arijit Sengupta, CEO of Aible, adds, "Today's market and labor conditions are constantly changing. Only autonomous agents can understand and adjust to these ever-changing patterns of customer behavior, inventory costs and supply, and labor access at scale. Working with NVIDIA and Supermicro, Aible brings autonomous agents subject to business user review to the retail edge."

These intelligent retail solutions will be demonstrated by Supermicro and its partners at NRF: Retail's Big Show in New York City from January 11-13. To learn more about AI-powered retail applications or Supermicro's AI Infrastructure solutions, visit Supermicro booth #5281 and attend its speaking session featuring PepsiCo and Kinetic Vision. For more details, please visit www.supermicro.com/NRF

¹Source: "NVIDIA State of AI in Retail and CPG" 2026

About Super Micro Computer, Inc.

Supermicro (NASDAQ: SMCI) is a global leader in Application-Optimized Total IT Solutions. Founded and operating in San Jose, California, Supermicro is committed to delivering first to market innovation for Enterprise, Cloud, AI, and 5G Telco/Edge IT Infrastructure. We are a Total IT Solutions provider with server, AI, storage, IoT, switch systems, software, and support services. Supermicro's motherboard, power, and chassis design expertise further enables our development and production, enabling next generation innovation from cloud to edge for our global customers. Our products are designed and manufactured in-house (in the US, Asia, and the Netherlands), leveraging global operations for scale and efficiency and optimized to improve TCO and reduce environmental impact (Green Computing). The award-winning portfolio of Server Building Block Solutions® allows customers to optimize for their exact workload and application by selecting from a broad family of systems built from our flexible and reusable building blocks that support a comprehensive set of form factors, processors, memory, GPUs, storage, networking, power, and cooling solutions (air-conditioned, free air cooling or liquid cooling).

Supermicro, Server Building Block Solutions, and We Keep IT Green are trademarks and/or registered trademarks of Super Micro Computer, Inc.

All other brands, names, and trademarks are the property of their respective owners.

 

• Innovative technologies enable retailers to implement intelligent stores at scale to deliver smarter, more responsive shopping experiences
• Industry partners to display production-ready AI solutions for loss prevention, digital twins, AI agents, customer analytics, and more

SAN JOSE, Calif. and NEW YORK, Jan. 11, 2026 /PRNewswire/ -- Retail's Big Show -- Super Micro Computer, Inc. (SMCI), a Total IT Solution Provider for AI/ML, HPC, Cloud, Storage, and 5G/Edge, today announced collaboration with technology partners for AI-powered intelligent in-store retail solutions designed to meet increasing customer expectations with scalability, improved productivity and increased profitability.

"AI is reshaping shopping experiences, enabling real-time analysis of video and other data to give retailers actionable insights to optimizing staff efficiency, reducing shrinkage, increasing profits, and avoiding stock-outs," said Charles Liang, president and CEO of Supermicro. "By combining Supermicro's complete and scalable AI platforms with NVIDIA RTX PRO accelerated computing solutions, we're enabling retailers to build intelligent stores that maximize the benefits of AI-driven applications."

According to the latest NVIDIA State of AI in Retail & CPG report, 89% of respondents reported that AI is helping to increase annual revenue, while 95% said it is helping decrease annual costs, highlighting the measurable business impact retailers are already achieving because of AI¹.

For more information, please visit https://www.supermicro.com/en/products/edge/servers

Supermicro Complete and Scalable Edge AI Infrastructure

Retail-centric AI applications require sub-second responsiveness which is only possible, at scale, if data is processed directly at the edge. Supermicro's Edge AI infrastructure enables the deployment of solutions in distributed environments, such as intelligent retail stores and supply chains, to provide a complete solution.

Deploying at the edge presents a myriad of unique challenges in comparison to the data center. Supermicro's broad Edge AI portfolio of products helps customers and partners overcome these challenges while striking the right balance between performance and ROI.

For deployments in harsh environments where conditioned space is not available, the fanless E103 series of products bring AI processing power where it couldn't go before. Supermicro also offers a fanned small form factor E300 series systems with AI capabilities.

When there is a demanding AI workload at the edge, customers and partners can turn to numerous systems capable of holding the latest discrete GPUs for AI acceleration. Ranging from 1U short-depth to larger 4U form factors, solutions can be right-sized to meet the customer's needs by enabling the latest generation of NVIDIA RTX PRO Blackwell series.

Supermicro Intelligent Store Partners

Supermicro is collaborating with ecosystem partners including Everseen, Kinetic Vision, ALLSIDES, LiveX, WobotAI, and Aible, to create intelligent stores that positively impact day-to-day retail operations as well as longer term supply chain management.

• Everseen's Evercheck solution uses Vision AI to help reduce shrink and improve staff productivity and customer experiences. Built on the Everseen Vision AI platform, Evercheck detects, and deters recovery of unwanted behaviors at checkout, helping retailers recover losses and streamline front-of-store operations.

"Everseen has spent years working alongside some of the world's largest retailers, understanding the realities of the store floor and solving loss challenges where they actually happen," said Joe White, CEO of Everseen. "By partnering with Supermicro and leveraging NVIDIA-accelerated computing, Evercheck delivers real-time computer vision at the edge - transforming store activity into intelligence retailers can act on immediately."

• Wobot AI, focused on building Video AI Agents for the physical world, will be demonstrating how the cameras retailers already own can be turned into systems that continuously observe, learn, and produce usable insight. By converting ordinary CCTV infrastructure into autonomous agents that recognize patterns, identify friction, and surface decisions, Wobot's AI Agents enable retailers to improve day-to-day operations with practical and measurable outcomes.

"By working with Supermicro and NVIDIA at the edge, we're able to deploy Video AI Agents in a way that's scalable, reliable, and focused on real-time operational insight—not experimentation," said Will Kelso, President, Revenue & Growth at Wobot AI.

• LiveX AI - "Retail is entering an era where AI agents become the default interaction layer between brands and customers," said Jerry Li, Co-Founder and CEO of LiveX AI. "With NVIDIA's accelerated AI and Supermicro's edge infrastructure, we can deploy a helpful, human-like AI agent directly in physical spaces—such as kiosks or holograms—bringing the speed, intelligence, and continuity of digital experiences into brick-and-mortar environments. This collaboration makes AI agents usable, in real time, where customers actually are."

• • Kinetic Vision and ALLSIDES are bundling their expertise for a True Digital Twin solution designed to develop, test, and optimize supply chain processes, checkout stations, and other complex systems.

"The combination of Supermicro's high reliability optimized infrastructure and NVIDIA's accelerated computing stack gives Kinetic Vision the foundation to innovate at speed. Together, we are helping retailers move from experimentation to production-ready AI solutions that drive measurable operational and customer experience gains," says Jeremy Jarratt, Kinetic Vision CEO.

Franz Tschimben, CEO at ALLSIDES, adds: "Building on the combined strengths of NVIDIA and Supermicro, we deliver a high-fidelity 3D digital twin data layer for AI training that enables retailers to power applications across the entire retail value chain — from training robots with physical AI, to production and production planning, virtual store layouts and consumer feedback systems, and e-commerce integrations — helping drive higher conversion rates, faster decision-making, and greater operational efficiency."

• Supermicro will also feature Superb AI's retail-focused VSS solution, combining Superb AI's proprietary VLM with NVIDIA AI Blueprint components to enable subjective reasoning capabilities, natural-language search, automated incident summarization, and customer behavior insights across store camera networks.
• Aible will highlight its automated agent solution, which analyzes vast amounts of data across millions of patterns to explain changes in retail KPIs, such as the average purchase amount or number of purchases. Aible will also demonstrate how the latest NVIDIA Retail blueprints can be incorporated into agentic solutions that automatically customize customer experiences and optimize retail operations at scale.

Arijit Sengupta, CEO of Aible, adds, "Today's market and labor conditions are constantly changing. Only autonomous agents can understand and adjust to these ever-changing patterns of customer behavior, inventory costs and supply, and labor access at scale. Working with NVIDIA and Supermicro, Aible brings autonomous agents subject to business user review to the retail edge."

These intelligent retail solutions will be demonstrated by Supermicro and its partners at NRF: Retail's Big Show in New York City from January 11-13. To learn more about AI-powered retail applications or Supermicro's AI Infrastructure solutions, visit Supermicro booth #5281 and attend its speaking session featuring PepsiCo and Kinetic Vision. For more details, please visit www.supermicro.com/NRF

¹Source: "NVIDIA State of AI in Retail and CPG" 2026

About Super Micro Computer, Inc.

Supermicro (NASDAQ: SMCI) is a global leader in Application-Optimized Total IT Solutions. Founded and operating in San Jose, California, Supermicro is committed to delivering first to market innovation for Enterprise, Cloud, AI, and 5G Telco/Edge IT Infrastructure. We are a Total IT Solutions provider with server, AI, storage, IoT, switch systems, software, and support services. Supermicro's motherboard, power, and chassis design expertise further enables our development and production, enabling next generation innovation from cloud to edge for our global customers. Our products are designed and manufactured in-house (in the US, Asia, and the Netherlands), leveraging global operations for scale and efficiency and optimized to improve TCO and reduce environmental impact (Green Computing). The award-winning portfolio of Server Building Block Solutions® allows customers to optimize for their exact workload and application by selecting from a broad family of systems built from our flexible and reusable building blocks that support a comprehensive set of form factors, processors, memory, GPUs, storage, networking, power, and cooling solutions (air-conditioned, free air cooling or liquid cooling).

Supermicro, Server Building Block Solutions, and We Keep IT Green are trademarks and/or registered trademarks of Super Micro Computer, Inc.

All other brands, names, and trademarks are the property of their respective owners.

 

** The press release content is from PR Newswire. Bastille Post is not involved in its creation. **

Supermicro Announces Intelligent In-Store Retail Solutions in Collaboration with a Broad Range of Industry Partners