What I Heard About AI at Aptos Engage 2026

When you spend enough time in marketing, you develop a certain relationship with the content you help create. You've seen the drafts. You've shaped the messaging. You know the data behind every claim before anyone else does. By the time an event keynote happens, you've usually lived through it three (or ten) times already.

So when I took a seat in the ballroom at the Graduate Nashville among nearly a hundred retail executives, operators and technology leaders for Aptos Engage 2026, I didn’t think I could be surprised. As I watched Aptos General Manager Jeremy Grunzweig step onto the stage to open the conference, I knew what he was going to say and where the slides were going. And yet, sitting in that room, listening to him walk through what Aptos has built, where we stand today and where we're headed, I found myself genuinely impressed and quite proud.

Jeremy opened with something you don't hear often enough in retail tech: earned confidence.

Not a lot of superlatives. Not a slide deck full of buzzwords. He talked about where Aptos is right now in the way someone speaks when they actually believe what they're saying. Our customer base includes some of the most recognized retail brands operating today. Our retention is strong. And the business itself? Healthy. FY 2025 closed very well, and the first half of FY 2026 has continued that momentum, with our revenue and all key financial metrics ahead of plan.

Our R&D investment story is one I'm genuinely proud of. Aptos is putting more into product and engineering than at any point in our history, and at 19.7% of revenue, our investment is well above industry norms. You see it in the release cadence. You see it in the quality of what we're shipping. Our Professional Services team built a test automation program that already saves 120 hours per release cycle. Every release we ship gets there faster and in better shape than the one before it.

Security is another area where we've put real resources to work. Over the past three years, Aptos has built strategic security partnerships. We already hold PCI, SOC 1 and SOC 2 compliance. And Jeremy shared at Engage that we're on track to secure ISO-27001 and ISO-42001 certifications later this year. These aren't checkbox exercises. They're the infrastructure that leading enterprise retailers demand.

What stayed with me was how Jeremy framed all of this. He didn't pitch stability as the absence of change. He pitched it as the thing that makes real change possible. Too many tech companies chase the shiny new thing at the expense of the customers who trusted them. We've tried to do it differently: Deliver consistently, build trust, then go bigger.

After Jeremy's opener, CTO Tushar Sachdev and Head of Architecture John Carney took the stage for a session called "The Agentic Era: Aptos AI in Action." I wasn't sure how the room would receive a deeply technical session right after breakfast, but it held everyone's attention from start to finish.

Tushar opened with a clear, direct statement: AI is no longer on the horizon for retail. It's here. The question is whether your platform and organization are ready to take advantage of it.

He discussed how Aptos thinks about AI, how we're building it and what it means for our customers. The centerpiece is the Concierge AI Agent, a personalized customer outreach capability that identifies high-value shoppers in a store's local area and automatically delivers a relevant, personalized message on behalf of the store associate. Think about what that actually means: the right product to the right customer at the right moment without the associate having to lift a finger, allowing them to stay focused on the floor. The target is 10% incremental store traffic.

What Tushar also really wanted the room to understand is that the Concierge Agent is one expression of something bigger. We are not only building our own agents, but we are building an agent foundry where retailers’ own agents can interoperate with all our products – a foundry that is more than just the tools themselves, but a house for the tools, with monitoring, metering and governance.

Keeping with the AI theme, we hosted an executive customer panel called "Building the Foundation for AI That Works in Retail." Three retail leaders talked honestly about what it actually takes to put AI to work in your business.

One of the panelists said something I wasn't expecting. He's a seasoned retail technology executive. He's been in conversations with vendors across the board, from small niche players to some of the biggest names in enterprise software. And he said this:

"I've been really gratified by Tushar and Aptos' vision. We've been talking to a lot of different vendors, and quite frankly, Aptos is out in front on their AI vision, their roadmap, their architecture, the way they're thinking about it, their development lifecycle. They're ahead of a lot of people we've talked to, including some really large vendors. You guys deserve a real shout-out for the intellectual capital you've put into this and for the integrity of the thinking."

He paused and added, "And I'm not being paid to say this, I promise."

As the person who oversees the marketing budget, I can promise you we didn't pay him! This was real appreciation for our commitment to interoperability and the fact that we’re not building a closed ecosystem. I've written a lot of messaging in my career, but none of it hits like a customer saying that to a room full of their peers.

Engage reminded me how much knowledge lives in those meeting rooms for two days. The honest conversations over lunch. The peer-to-peer comparisons of how different retailers are approaching the same problems. That exchange of ideas is worth the trip by itself. If you are an Aptos customer and missed the event, please reach out and we'll get you up to speed.

If you're a retailer who isn't working with Aptos yet: The AI landscape is loud right now. Every vendor has a story. What a vendor can't manufacture is a customer standing up voluntarily in front of their peers and saying you're ahead of the pack. That's what happened at Engage 2026, and it's the kind of signal worth paying attention to.

The conversations, ideas and connections made during Aptos Engage 2026 are already shaping what comes next. We're grateful to everyone who joined us, and whether you were in the room or following along from afar, we hope to see you at our next event. Until then, catch the highlights in the video below.