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NEW YORK — Aptos announced during NRF 2025 Big Show that big changes — and even bigger investment — are coming to its Aptos ONE platform in 2025. According to Aptos CEO Pete Sinisgalli, the software firm has committed to its largest R&D spend in company history in 2025. That amplified investment will fund major new Aptos ONE capabilities, faster release cycles and a transition to a unified data model across Aptos applications.
Aptos’ bold moves in innovation come during a technology inflection point for retailers. Outdated and siloed retail systems pose too much risk — from operational constraints and customer experience disconnects to security vulnerabilities. Avoidance of these risks will drive mass adoption of modern POS solutions and unified commerce platforms in 2025 and beyond.
“At Aptos, we talk to hundreds of retailers each year, and I can tell you the question is no longer ‘if’ they’ll be adopting a modern POS solution. The question is now ‘when?’ said Aptos general manager Jeremy Grunzweig. “The question then becomes: What vendor will support them on their unified commerce journey? We want that answer to be Aptos.
“That means more investment, scale, resources and innovation are going into Aptos ONE.” Grunzweig continued, “We have added extensive core POS and omnichannel capabilities to Aptos ONE over the last 12 months, and our 2025 roadmap brings the ‘sizzle.’”
Aptos ONE 2025 Roadmap Highlights
Here’s a look at some of the sizzle coming to Aptos ONE in 2025:
- AI Insights: Aptos is bringing more AI experiences into the store in 2025, including sales and customer insights and personalized product recommendations.
According to Nikki Baird, vice president of Strategy and Product at Aptos: “Over the last two years, we’ve put a lot of focus into platform readiness for AI. This has included evaluating partners as well as preparing our data strategy.
“In 2025, we will introduce AI-generated customer insights summarizations and product recommendations.” Baird added, “These will be displayed to store associates via the Aptos ONE POS UI during customer inquiry and product inquiry lookups. With these AI insights, associates have highly relevant information to engage customers in that moment — creating a more personalized and service-oriented experience.”
Specific to store operations, Aptos will be launching a GenAI chatbot that can help store associates and store managers better understand what’s happening in their stores and leverage that data to drive improved sales performance.
According to Baird, the GenAI chatbot is one of the ways Aptos is promoting data-driven decision-making on the front line of retail.
“We’re bringing advanced embedded reporting to Aptos ONE in 2025, and with our GenAI chatbot, we are making analytical sales data more accessible and actionable for store staff,” Baird said. “For example, a store manager can ask the chatbot, ‘What are the five worst selling items in this store this week?’ Based on the response, the manager might decide to alter promotional and visual merchandising activities for those products.”
- Clienteling: The more personalized you can make the experience for shoppers, the more likely they are to become loyal customers and brand ambassadors. That is the premise behind new Clienteling features available in Aptos ONE.
“In addition to the AI-generated customer insights and personalized product recommendations, also coming to Aptos ONE in 2025 is customer-level visual purchase history,” said Ian Auerbach, VP of Product Management at Aptos. “Other details we provide to associates to help personalize the customer’s shopping experience include loyalty status, return information, style preferences, special occasions such as birthdays and other data contained within a CRM.
“Aptos ONE is extremely effective at bringing together information about customers and products and presenting that information in a way that is meaningful and compact for associates.” Auerbach continued, “Importantly, Aptos Clienteling is available in the POS UI; employees do not have to reference a separate application or a separate device. This makes personalization via Aptos ONE very natural and seamlessly integrated into customer-associate interactions.”
- Store Inventory Management & Fulfillment: Following Aptos’ 2024 release of its Store Inventory Management (SIM) application, the company is expanding that app’s functionality in 2025 to include fulfillment.
With Aptos Store Inventory Management & Fulfillment, retailers can holistically manage all movement of inventory coming into or leaving the store. This includes support for shipping and receiving; cycle counts; inventory adjustments; pricing updates; carrier integration and shipping label printing for transfers between stores or return to vendor; viewing, picking, packing and shipping of orders routed to the store for fulfillment; damaged disposition; and more.
“It’s impossible to be a successful and profitable omnichannel retailer without the effective management of store inventory and fulfillment,” said Auerbach. “We’re combining our SIM & Fulfillment offerings into a single app to make it easier than ever for retailers to achieve accurate and precise inventory processes in store and streamlined fulfillment workflows.
“With our SIM & Fulfillment app, retailers are best positioned to tap into the power of store inventory to maximize sell-through and keep promises to their customers.”
Faster Product Release Cycles in 2025
To deliver on the product advancements noted above, and dozens of others, Aptos will be moving from two major releases per year to five releases, with that transition starting in 2025.
“In every decision we make, we are balancing what drives maximum business benefit for our customers and how to continuously improve release velocity, quality and field performance,” said Aptos CTO Tushar Sachdev.
“As a modern, SaaS company, we want to deliver new code to our customers every 10 weeks,” Sachdev continued. “We are also sensitive to the fact that our clients are enterprise retailers — many of which operate hundreds or thousands of stores across global markets, and with many competing IT priorities, so they may not be ready to take new functionality that often.
“That’s why we’re introducing release flags that give us the ability to ‘hide’ new features within a release, so that the capability is delivered to a specific customer in the off position until they are ready to adopt it.” Sachdev added, “This allows us to increase release velocity while still being highly attentive to the needs of each and every customer.”
Unified Data with Snowflake AI Data Cloud
As recently announced, another major technology initiative underway at Aptos is its move to a unified commerce data model through its use of the Snowflake AI Data Cloud.
Aptos is currently mapping its data models in Snowflake for each of its software applications. Following a phased rollout in 2025, Snowflake will become the de facto way that Aptos’ SaaS customers access their data within Aptos’ solutions — whether that data relates to transactions, orders, inventory or customers.
“With our data transformation, we are not only providing a unified view, we are also revolutionizing the way our customers access and leverage data,” Baird said. “We see unlimited opportunities for retailers to visualize and analyze their unified commerce data in new and different ways.”
For more info visit Aptos booth 5139 during NRF 2025: Retail’s Big Show, which takes place Jan. 12-14, 2025, in New York City.