Meet Adriana Rivas: Gold Stevie® Award Winner and Founder

Introduction

Adriana Rivas is not the kind of executive who has climbed to the peak of the retail tech industry by following a conventional route. She didn’t learn computer science or join the area as a software engineer. Instead, like very few tech leaders, she began her professional career at the accounting department with retailers throughout Latin America where being close to the bottom rung of commerce allowed her to grasp exactly what people who depend on technology are going to lose when technology fails them. Although not a very appealing experience it gave her insight and that is how she built up her hardware brand, wrote a successful business book, and was one of the recipients of the most prestigious award in the United States business world.

The Formative Years at BIGWISE

Rivas started as the accounting manager at BIGWISE Corp in 2007 when retail technology was still the static and slowly changing domain it is now. It was only there that she changed gears. Observing store operators grappling with disjointed systems, ill-conceived software and hardware packages, and tools that looked great in the presentation pitch but were very impractical in the real work environment, she realized that the problem of the sector was basically in execution. Most of the retail solutions were hardware and software components coming together from different providers resulting in integration issues that mid-market retailers could not solve on their own. It was only that frustration that she saw over the years in many very able businesses stuck due to not having the right tool that formed, later one, the foundation of all she created.

Executive Role Today

Her professional path slowly transformed from finance into operations, then strategic leadership. At present, Rivas is responsible for overseeing Chief Operating Officer & Chief Biwitech Development Officer roles together at BIGWISE Corp. This tech firm was originally set up in 1992 with a vision of offering solutions and services to midmarket clients who have been traditionally ignored by enterprise vendors and whose needs ordinary software tools cannot meet. In this position, she takes care of three main segments day-to-day: Stellar is the company’s comprehensive point-of-sale and retail management system; Co-founded, Biwitech is a popular piece of hardware SLIVE.AI is an artificially intelligent retailing platform which was launched in November 2025. What keeps her work exciting is how she is able to find solutions at the very point where technology enables a thing and the retailer, on a typical Tuesday afternoon, needs that thing.

Biwitech: The Flagship Achievement

Biwitech is something many see as Rivas’s most significant professional success. The brand wasn’t conceived through strategic discussions in a corporate building. Instead, through personal interactions with retail managers across Latin America, it emerged. The managers were dealing with high-volume business, they had mismatched hardware from different manufacturers and their systems were loosely connected at best. By taking this feedback, Rivas did not only focus on software, but she launched a product that combined both, built from the ground up and already compatible with the Stellar system. The range from Biwitech includes not only self-checkout kiosks, but also retail terminals, interactive posters, e-Labels for price, and digital signs, and it has now expanded to four countries among which the USA. In less than half a year after the broader deployment of Biwitech, 240 shops across different countries were already using their AI-driven systems. Rivas decided when to go public with Biwitech, which she has admitted was one of the trickiest leadership calls she made – going public while the company was far from being mature rather than waiting for the brand to be perfect since that was impossible at the speed of market changes.

Bridging the U.S.–Latin America Information Gap

As a bilingual leader in business across North America and Latin America, Rivas has noticed a long-standing information imbalance in the retail industry which goes largely unnoticed. For example, retail decision-makers in Latin American countries are not always privy to the same kind or quality of help in implementation as their peers in the US, and this has actually quite real operational repercussions. The solution she created to bridge the gap was to build adrianarivas.tech, a media site that brings actionable, on-the-ground advice on technology installation in retail for four countries. This site has evolved into the go-to source for retailers, who refer to it for insights on the unique challenges of digital transformation in regions where infrastructure development, customer behavior, and vendor landscapes are far removed from the standard assumptions of industry publications.

The Book

Her book How to Implement Self-Service Without Failing carried the theme to a larger general readership. The book has been on the market since 2025 and has been the Amazon Number One Hot New Release in Retailing on more than one occasion, which is a very good mark at all, because this one has actually won the Silver Nonfiction Book Award in the Business Technology category, something that not too many books can boast of. It is basically a hands-on manual written from the point of view of someone who had firsthand seen self-service operations turning out not great and has been able to figure out the reasons. Rather than promoting a particular solution or equipment, it offers retailers strategies they can use to introduce automation without at the same time compromising customer experience and the stability of the operations. The book has emerged as one of the major representations of Rivas’s standing as a thought leader, i.e. someone who is not only aware of retail tech but actually gets her hands dirty by first implementing the systems and then describing their functioning.

The Gold Stevie® Award

Her standing was officially acknowledged at the very first meeting of business leaders in April 2026. Rivas was announced as the Gold Stevie Award recipient for Thought Leader of the Year in the Business Products category of the 24th Annual American Business Awards, which is considered as the best business awards program in America. Given that the competition on nominees was wide-reaching worldwide, this acclaim is a huge deal: more than 3,600 nominations were judged by over 250 business experts globally, and Rivas was the sole Gold medalist in her particular division. Rivas had been planning to submit a nomination for herself, but the most favorable expectation, at that time, was a Bronze. That Gold award, That means, proved what Rivas has already put into practice in various ways: through published works that she has contributed through the years, use of technology, and operator feedback – that is, that openly and freely disseminating technical knowledge, across different languages and geographic barriers, is an actual form of leadership.

Broader Recognition and Legacy

As a busy working woman, author, and advisor, Rivas also acts as a Global Ambassador for the WomenTech Network and a Circle Leader. WomenTech Network is one of the largest communities in the world supporting women in technology. She was a recipient of one of The CEO Magazine’s “Top Tech Innovators for 2025” and earned a Bronze recognition as “Chief in Tech Leader of the Year” from WomenTech Global Awards 2025. The essence of her message is unchanged through all these roles – operational thinking leaders can be great technology drivers. Having a background in finance or accounting does not mean it is a detour from top leadership in tech – on the contrary it is a base for that. Also, when women entrepreneurs create across regions and languages, they offer valuable insights to the technological industry. A conventional way of doing things produces very little. Rivas made her career precisely by following these ideas, and her success has been a loud demonstration of that.