Aptos’ Nikki Baird on AI and the Next Era of Retail POS | RTS 2026

Hello, everyone.

This is Omnitalk Retail.

I am Chris Walton and we are coming to you live from the Retail Technology show in fabulous London in the fabulous Fusion podcast studio.

Now, joining me is someone who we've talked to a few times over the years.

Nikki, how many times have we talked.

To you over the years?

I don't know, like, definitely a handful at least.

Yeah.

Yeah, I think so.

For sure.

You're getting.

You're getting up there into the.

You're close to the Five Timers Club.

I think you're probably getting.

Do I get a jacket?

I don't know.

We gotta decide.

We always get asked that question.

But you're getting close.

But yes.

Without further ado, Nikki Baird, who's the Vice President of Strategy and Product at aptos.

Nikki, how are you doing today?

I'm good.

It's been a really great show.

Lots of great energy and good discussions.

Yeah.

So remind our audience.

I kind of joked in the beginning that we've had you on before, but remind our audience because we have a lot of new listeners as well, especially over here in Europe.

Remind our audience of who you are and what you oversee in your role.

Yeah.

As VP of Strategy and Product, I'm responsible for multiple areas.

Some of it is our product feature, but we're.

What I really kind of do is I look at the future at the consumer level and how that impacts retailers, and then I translate that both for their own operations as well as for our product direction.

So are you a futurist?

You know, kinda are, yeah.

There's very few people that can actually say that in their job.

I know, I know.

And I mean, I love it because for me, any technology investment really has to come from what's the consumer behavior that is driving it.

How, how is that gonna change what the retailer needs to do in response and then what do they need from a technology perspective in order to enable that?

So you can't really.

You can't really predict the product future unless you're predicting the consumer future, right?

100%.

I think that's the kind of the theme of the show for me so far.

What brought you to rts?

What brought you to the retail technology show?

Well, the UK market is a very important market for us in general, but actually the RTS show specifically, I mean, it's retail technology show, so that helps.

Seems like a place for you to be.

Yeah, it is a good place to be, but actually their content is really.

I think they do a really good job of getting leaders in business and getting them to Talk about hard problems that they're trying to address.

We're a big sponsor of that because we really believe that they bring a service to the industry at a time when we really need it.

Got it.

And you were speaking too, right?

I was, I was on an AI panel.

Oh, you were?

I was.

Oh, wow.

What words of wisdom did you share on said panel?

Oh my gosh.

I mean, we, we definitely talked a lot about just how disruptive ding it is and that the future is not set by any means.

And, and, and you kind of have to live in two worlds at once.

You have to be all in.

And also you have to be super cautious that this could all collapse in a bubble in a moment's notice.

Right, right, right.

Okay.

All right, now let's turn to some aptos news.

So you, you all launched aptos One.

What is aptos one?

Yeah, so that is our next generation point of sale.

It's also a platform that we're building on that is really focused on cloud native retail solutions.

Point of sale is the first, but we're really going to bring along our whole solution set across all of commerce and into inventory management as well.

And I would say that in the whole AI world, it's a place where we really see an opportunity to expose.

We own all the transaction data in a company, basically a retailer from nothing's.

More important than POS point of sale,.

But also orders, customers, inventory, product, like all of those things are things that we own and govern.

And in an AI world, you need to expose and make that accessible more than ever.

And that's really that platform investment that we're making.

Got it.

So is it, is it a mobile first concept?

Like how should I think about this?

Yeah, from a point of sale perspective, it is absolutely mobile first.

You know, we really were designing something to empower and release the store associate.

We, you know, we operate mostly in high consideration retail businesses so we really, it's, it's all about how the store associate delivers to the consumer as opposed to like trying to enable the consumer to go around or that the store associates not going to be there.

That doesn't work for us.

We need that store associate to be front and center and we need them to be empowered and that means out from behind the till.

So yeah, so it means a world with no fixed tills, no legacy infrastructure.

How hard is it to convince say a legacy retailer of that concept?

It depends.

How wedded are they to the way they're currently doing things?

Yeah, you know, it really does depend.

So there are Definitely retailers who are saying, I can't keep doing this the way that I've been doing it before.

I mean, even just the hardware alone is enough to derail a point of sale replacement, because just the dollar value, the pound value that you have to invest in is substantial.

So I think there are retailers who are realizing, no, I need to get out from underneath this, I need to change that.

I think there are retailers who are still in a mindset of, I gotta eke every last penny out of my existing estate before I can make some moves.

But even those retailers now are coming to the table and saying, I gotta at least try mobile.

I gotta get.

I gotta unleash my store associates.

I.

Even if it's either in my store or sometimes they're coming to us saying, I got to go where my customers are and they're not in my store, I need to go to events, I need to go to the kinds of lifestyle things that my customers are interested in and I got to be there.

How do I get there?

Yeah.

The other aspect too, that I like about it, from what I've talked about in the past too, is, you know, apparel is one type of business between January and November, and then come November, it's a different type of business.

And this type of approach allows you to scale up to the customer demand as well.

Right.

More so than you can with fixed legacy.

Yeah, it definitely is.

It is about that flexibility.

I mean, it's even about the flexibility of, I'm going to take this device and today I'm going to use it as a point of sale and tomorrow I'm going to use it to pick orders to fulfill from online and the day after that I'm going to use it to receive inventory in the back.

So to be able to have that flexibility to move that around, how you need it in your estate on any given day is really important.

Got it.

All right.

I'm not even sure this is a good question to ask, honestly, Nikki.

I'm not even sure it's the right question, but I'm going to ask it anyway.

Are European retailers ahead or behind their US counterparts when it comes to point of sale?

You're trying to get me in trouble now.

You know, it's not that the markets mature differently for different reasons.

So if you look at the UK market in particular, right, you can have a warehouse in the Midlands and you can deliver to a home across the whole entire country in about four hours if you really want to.

So from an omnichannel perspective, like leveraging store Inventory, it hasn't been as much of a priority because they haven't needed it.

But now they're finding that, you know, when consumers come into stores, they really expect the full estate to be available to them from an assortment perspective.

And so now retailers are looking at much more on the save the sale side.

If I don't have it, I need to be able to get it to you.

And they are rethinking that click and collect to really be more leveraging the store inventory more.

I think just the, you know, I've got to be able to serve that customer as quickly as possible and I've got to make sure that I have the inventory available to capture that sale.

If I'm out of stock in the warehouse and I'm only fulfilling from the warehouse, then I'm out of stock everywhere, even if it's sitting on a shelf two miles away.

So that's, that is changing things significantly.

That is a dynamic that's developing.

Okay, all right.

So AI, you mentioned it before.

It's been the talk of the town at the conference actually.

I'm gonna ask you point blank, is the industry ready for it or do you think things still need to happen across the industry for us to really harness it in a way that ultimately I think all of us probably can envision to some degree.

Yeah, yeah, I think there's definitely a lot more to be done.

Everything that's happening right now is very surface level.

It is really.

I'm adding a chatbot to my site and it's doing product recommendations.

So you can have natural language search and you can have natural language answers and you know, I can say what kind of sweater should I wear on a first date?

And it's going to recommend products to me and that's all great.

However, there's a lot more work that needs to be done to product and to inventory availability and pricing too.

I mean a lot of retailers have a very different strategy for pricing online than they do in their stores.

And if you're going to offer cross channel capabilities or if you've got a third party like a platform LLM that's crawling your site, it's going to see, see your online prices and it's not going to see your store prices.

And are those the prices that you really want to put in front of customers?

So there's a lot of data work that needs to be done.

Yeah.

And where's that scraping coming from too?

How accurate is it?

Right, let's talk about.

So if you pay by the serving up a pdp.

Right.

If you pay your E comm provider for that and a bot comes and asks for all of your products and all of your pricing and all of your inventory availability, that is going to get expensive very, very quickly.

Wow.

Wow.

So I'm curious, like, so as you think about, you know, you said you're a futurist and you're thinking about the product strategy and trying to go where the consumer is wants to take you or wants to take the industry, where are you thinking that you will bolster or fortify the Aptos product given what you're seeing with AI?

Yeah, I mean for us right now it's all about mcp.

So model context, protocol.

Think of them as like super powered APIs that make not just data, but actions that your solutions can take available to other agents from outside.

So we want to write agents, of course, but we know there's going to be lots of other agents out there that retailers either are going to buy or they're going to write themselves.

And so being able to both expose the data, but also something like create an order or cancel an order or add a customer, those are not just data transfer actions.

They're.

They're actions, they're verbs.

Right.

That you have to be able to support.

So for us it's important to expose all of that as much as possible.

That's our future.

Oh man, this is good stuff.

This is good stuff.

All right.

You've also called out.

I'm going to get you out here on this.

You've also called out that you often see retailers and this is true, I 100% agree with you.

You see retailers confuse tech investment with transformation.

Where are you seeing genuine business model leverage happening throughout the industry?

Yeah.

So in the store.

Because that's our primary frame of focus.

I will say that the retailers who are most successful in adopting like a new point of sale or mobile in particular, they truly unleash their store associates.

A lot of retailers now have what they would consider to be like a priority or a test bed store.

Right.

A store where the store manager and the store associates, the lab store, are primed like their receptive to change.

They're experimental, they're willing to try stuff that's really, really important.

But you go in there and you say, okay, here's a mobile device.

How do you want to use it?

Right.

And really pushing them to think that through.

I was just visiting a retailer, one of our customers who sent all of their executive team out into stores and said, look, it's been too long.

You Got to go be.

You got to go work a store.

And they came back and they were like, I can't believe they have to press like 10 buttons to.

To do this one thing.

Or we have to receive inventory from this third party and they have to go to a website, so they have to back out a point of sale in order to do that because we can't support it in the back room and blah.

And like, all of those things, they came back like, oh, my gosh, all of these pain points, I can't believe.

And that's what you.

You gotta match up somebody who experiences those pain points with somebody who can explain those pain points to other people who can actually do something about it.

I think that's key.

If you just throw it out there and you say, do something cool with it, I don't know that you're going to get what you're looking for.

And I'm hopeful that AI helps us one, identify where those gaps are and then helps us quickly improve them faster than we've ever been able to.

Yeah, that's my hope.

That's my golden dream for what happens.

Next, Provided that we're not in this massive AI bubble that's going to implode and bring the whole economy down just to keep it a little bit real.

Provided that doesn't happen.

One thing that I think that AI is really going to change for retail is it will.

It makes it so much faster to write integration, like agents can write integration for you.

Integration has been such a huge pain point for retail, and in five years, that could go away completely.

That's crazy, right?

Great point to end on, too.

Well, Nikki, thank you so much.

This is great, man.

What wonderful banter back and forth.

That was fabulous.

All right, Nikki from aptos.

And thanks to Vuzion and the Retail Technology show for partnering with us and helping us to bring you all this great content all week long with great executives like Nikki herself.

And on behalf of all of us at omnitalk, as always, be careful out there.