As the retail landscape continues to evolve, innovative technologies are playing a crucial role in reshaping operations and enhancing the customer experience. At NRF 2025, we spoke with leaders from various tech companies to uncover insights into how cutting-edge solutions are driving efficiency, improving supply chains, and transforming the in-store and online shopping experience. From AI-powered tools that boost conversion rates to seamless integrations that streamline inventory management, the latest retail tech is designed to help businesses adapt to global disruptions, meet compliance needs, and stay ahead of the competition.
In this article, we explore key takeaways from industry leaders at NRF 2025 and how their solutions are shaping the future of retail.
Adapting to Global Disruptions: How ITF Group Is Helping Retailers Build Resilient Supply Chains for 2025
With ongoing global disruptions and shifting trade policies, retailers are moving from a just-in-time to a just-in-case supply chain strategy. Sam Agyemang, VP of business development at ITF Group, highlighted the importance of proactive logistics planning, emphasizing early inventory stocking, smart warehousing, and real-time tracking to mitigate risks. As tariffs on imported goods rise and shipping routes face geopolitical challenges, businesses that invest in resilient supply chain strategies will be better positioned for stability and growth, according to Agyemang.
“A lot of shippers are concerned about whether or not they’re going to have good inventory levels, especially for goods that come from overseas. And with the right logistics partner, they can kind of iron out smart logistics for you, whether it’s warehousing or implementing good technology to kind of basically mitigate some of those issues, but we’re here essentially to help you. But if you don’t have a strategy in 2025, you might find yourself failing,” Agyemang said.
Watch the full interview for more insights on navigating supply chain challenges in 2025.
Transforming Retail With AI: How App0’s Smart Technology Is Boosting Conversion Rates and Customer Loyalty
Darpan Saini, CEO of App0, highlighted how its AI-driven technology is enhancing the online shopping experience. Unlike traditional AI chatbots, App0’s AI agents integrate across a retailer’s entire digital presence, engaging customers through personalized recommendations, interactive FAQs, and AI-powered quizzes. By tailoring AI behavior to specific product categories, the platform aims to improve conversion rates and customer loyalty. This approach reflects a broader trend in retail technology — leveraging AI to create more intuitive and seamless shopping experiences.
“So, when a shopper engages with the AI agent, our conversion rate is actually 10 to 12 times when someone does not engage,” Saini explained. “So, you’re talking about the industry where, you know, conversion rates languish between 1% to 2% when someone engages with our AI, they’re converting that upwards of 20%, so that’s a massive boost in the revenue of a company.”
Watch the full interview here to learn more.
Powering the Future of Retail: How Verizon Business’s Networks Are Transforming the Shopping Experience
Mark Tina, channel chief & VP of indirect partner sales at Verizon Business, talked about how the company is revolutionizing retail by leveraging its world-class 4G and 5G networks, along with private network solutions, to enhance connectivity and streamline operations. Tina highlighted how these innovations power immersive wayfinding, in-store robotics, and electronic shelf labeling — helping retailers create a frictionless shopping experience. By enabling real-time information and seamless store navigation, Verizon’s technology is shaping the future of customer engagement and efficiency in retail.
“We’re trying to take the friction out of the shopping experience. So when you think about going to a store, whether it’s small or large, these types of technologies help customers to know where to go in the store and provide on-the-spot information — whether it’s nutritional labels or facts about things, promotional pricing, etc.,” Tina stated.
Watch the full interview to learn how Verizon’s cutting-edge networks are revolutionizing retail, enhancing in-store experiences, and streamlining operations.
Balancing AI and People: How Movista Is Transforming Retail Operations
Stan Zylowski, founder and CEO of Movista, talked about how the company is transforming retail operations by streamlining communication, enhancing efficiency, and integrating AI-driven insights. He highlighted how their “single pane of glass” approach ensures field teams can access everything they need in one place, reducing friction and improving execution. AI and image recognition further optimize store operations by providing real-time, store-specific actions, replacing outdated, pre-planned directives. While technology drives efficiency, Zylowski emphasized that people remain the core of retail success — empowering employees with the right tools is key to thriving in the evolving retail landscape.
“So, I would just emphasize that we often do when we talk to customers, that you are going to rise and fall based upon how easy you make it for your workers to do exactly what you hope they would be doing today and at this moment, it’s a people business,” said Zylowski. “So, AI aside, AI is going to help. AI is going to make everybody make their lives a little better. But don’t lose sight of people being the most important thing.”
Watch the full interview for deeper insights into the future of retail execution.
Revolutionizing Retail With Solum: Seamless Digital Signage and ESL Integration for a Smarter Shopping Experience
Douglas Lake, associate vice president at Solum, highlighted how the company’s digital signage seamlessly integrates with electronic shelf labels (ESL) to create an intelligent, customer-facing solution. By connecting pricing and product information on both ESLs and larger displays, they’re simplifying operations and enhancing the shopping experience with minimal complexity and fewer touchpoints.
“With our displays, they can simply be an endpoint within an NDI environment and receive and de-code that signal, and it reduces the complexity, and because there aren’t extra components, it also creates far less failure points as well. Overall, the message is simplicity,” Lake said during the interview.
Optimizing Supply Chains With AI: How Orderful Is Enhancing Efficiency and Accuracy in Retail
Leah Weimer, director of channels and alliances, and Rahul Vallish, director of sales and engineering, shared how Orderful is revolutionizing retail supply chain operations by using AI to streamline the onboarding of trading partners. Their platform ensures data accuracy and conformity, allowing retailers and vendors to easily onboard without the need for technical expertise. With a focus on speed, Orderful can onboard partners in under nine days, with pre-built integrations enabling test runs in just one hour — transforming the traditionally slow and complex process into a fast, efficient operation.
“With bringing AI into the platform, we say nine days… we want to be nine seconds. EDI is very important to these businesses,” Weimer said. “They need to recognize this revenue quickly, and the order to cash workflow, we can actually onboard these trading partners faster than anyone else in the market.”
Watch the full interview to see how Orderful is accelerating partner onboarding, ensuring data accuracy, and driving faster, smarter operations in retail.
Enhancing In-Store Efficiency: How Brother Mobile Solutions Is Transforming Retail With Advanced Printing and Labeling
From Brother Mobile Solutions, Sr. Business Development Manager Nick D’Alessio and Sales Director Theo Bielowicz talked about how their company is helping retailers enhance in-store experiences by streamlining operations with advanced printing and labeling solutions. As customers return to stores, retailers are focusing on efficiency and clarity, ensuring products are properly tagged and labeled. By enabling fast and accurate labeling on products and shelves, retailers can meet compliance needs and improve the customer experience, all while adapting to a mobile-driven retail environment.
Bielowicz stated, “We enable the retailers to be able to tag, label, identify any product in the store, whether it’s on the shelf or on the actual item itself, and really allow the retailer to do that in the most efficient manner possible, whether it’s in the back room or on the store floor.”
Watch the full interview to discover how Brother Mobile Solutions is streamlining retail operations.
Leveraging AI and Real-Time Traceability: How Seagull Software Is Preventing Stockouts and Tackling Supply Chain Disruptions
Seagull Software’s CEO Chris Cassidy and CTO Gustavo Rivera discussed how their AI-driven platform and real-time traceability are enabling retailers to tackle supply chain disruptions and prevent stockouts. By leveraging high-resolution data and AI, Seagull’s solutions enhance agility and data accuracy, allowing businesses to make smarter, more informed decisions across the supply chain. The recent merger with Mojix strengthens these capabilities, offering even greater flexibility and precision for retailers in managing inventory and operations.
“We see AI as really helping improve processes within our customers, where it’s in the supply chain, whether it’s inventory… how we make our customers have a better level of accurate and harmonized or normalized data allows them to make more intelligent decisions,” Cassidy shared.
Watch the full interview to learn how the Seagull-Mojix merger is driving the future of supply chain tech.
Optimizing Retail Workforce Management: How Deputy’s AI-Powered Scheduling Is Driving Efficiency and Compliance
Joshua Thomas, a senior enterprise account executive from Deputy, shared how AI-powered predictive scheduling is helping retailers tackle shrinking labor budgets, compliance challenges, and workforce shortages. He shared insights on how the company’s machine learning technology optimizes schedules, reduces costs, and ensures fair workweek compliance, while its mobile-friendly platform enhances engagement across a multi-generational workforce. With retailers seeing major efficiency gains, Deputy is proving essential for cost-effective, compliant, and scalable workforce management in an evolving retail landscape, highlighted Thomas.
“A lot of retailers are still scheduling very inefficiently. Typically, having a large optimization department requires some level of enormous scale in a business, and a lot of retailers don’t have that. At Deputy, we’re actually able to look at that on a much smaller scale using machine learning and see those trends in demand and then schedule that labor when it’s needed, which helps drive down those labor costs and improves that sales per labor hour metric,” Thomas explained.
Watch the full interview to learn how Deputy’s AI-powered scheduling is transforming retail operations, boosting productivity, and ensuring compliance.