Adriana Rivas Earns Gold Stevie® Award for Thought Leader of the Year — The Only Gold Winner in Business Products

The retail technology executive and award-winning author is recognized at the 24th Annual American Business Awards® for building a practitioner-led thought leadership platform that bridges the U.S. and Latin American markets.

In a field crowded with voices offering predictions and abstractions, Adriana Rivas built something different: a thought leadership platform grounded entirely in field experience. That approach has now earned her the Gold Stevie® Award for Thought Leader of the Year in the Business Products category at the 24th Annual American Business Awards® (ABA), the most prestigious business recognition program in the United States.

Rivas was the only Gold winner in the Business Products thought leadership category. The honor comes after a pool of more than 3,700 nominations was evaluated by over 230 professionals worldwide, making the recognition one of the most competitive in the program’s history.

“This recognition belongs to the retailers and operators who used these guides to make better decisions and to every professional who believed that technical knowledge, shared openly, is its own form of leadership.” — Adriana Rivas

From the Field, Not the Podium

What sets Rivas apart from conventional industry voices is the source of her credibility. As Chief Operating Officer of BIGWISE Corp, a retail technology company with operations across the United States and several Latin American countries, she has led real-world deployments of the same self-service and smart-store systems she writes about publicly.

Her book, How to Implement Self-Service Without Failing, debuted as an Amazon #1 Hot New Release and earned the Silver Nonfiction Book Award in 2025. The title is not a theoretical framework; it is a practitioner’s guide drawn directly from the challenges retail operators face when adopting automation, built for decision-makers who need answers that work in real stores, not just in strategy decks.

“What sets her apart is her bilingual, cross-cultural leverage serving both U.S. and Latin American markets with genuinely different insights for each.”

Three Pillars That Earned the Gold

The ABA nomination recognized three interconnected dimensions of Rivas’s work:

Practical Education. Through her book and her platform at adrianarivas.tech, Rivas has created a reference library for retail operators navigating the adoption of self-service technology, translating complex infrastructure decisions into actionable guidance.

Cross-Border Influence. Her bilingual platform bridges a genuine information gap between the U.S. and Latin American retail technology markets, delivering field-tested guidance to operators across several countries content published in both English and Spanish for audiences with distinct regulatory and commercial realities.

Community Leadership. As a WomenTech Network Global Ambassador and Circle Leader, and an active member of Retail Women in Tech, Rivas has extended her influence beyond publishing, mentoring professionals, and advocating for representation in technology leadership across the Americas.

What the Recognition Unlocks

For Rivas, the Gold Stevie® is not a destination; it is a signal. Her sights are set on the continued expansion of the adrianarivas.tech platform and deepening her retail technology content across both languages.

The ABA gala, where winners will be formally presented with their awards, takes place on June 9, 2026, at the Marriott Marquis Hotel in New York. Rivas will attend as the sole Gold honoree in her category.

The full list of 24th Annual American Business Awards® winners is available at aba.stevieawards.com.

About Adriana Rivas

Adriana Rivas is a retail technology executive and AI strategist, and the founder of a U.S.-based hardware company specializing in self-service kiosks, POS systems, electronic shelf labels, and digital signage deployed across the United States and Latin America. She is the award-winning author of How to Implement Self-Service Without Failing (Amazon #1 Hot New Release, Silver Nonfiction Book Award 2025) and recipient of the Gold Stevie Award for Thought Leader of the Year 2026. She is also recognized by Thinkers360 as a Top 10 Retail Thought Leader and a Certified Retail Expert.