India’s retail market is on track to reach US $2 trillion by 2030. At the 20th Retail Leadership Summit (RLS), held on February 16 and 17 at the Jio World Convention Centre in Mumbai, the message was clear. Growth at this scale will depend on how quickly retailers adopt smarter technology. Across the show floor, the emphasis was on building connected, data-led businesses that can respond faster to customers and market changes.
Against this backdrop, Happiest Minds Technologies demonstrated how Gen AI and IoT can digitise physical stores. These tools enable frictionless checkout, real-time shelf monitoring, and customer heatmaps that show how shoppers move through a store. The company also highlighted the use of GenAI for personalised product discovery and context-based recommendations, along with predictive algorithms that can adjust pricing and promotions instantly based on demand signals and competitor activity.
“We provide RFID, POS systems, and even demand forecasting for retail stores. We also help automate manual processes like PO generation using bots and AI, which otherwise require multiple people to manage,” said Ishaan Aggarwal, Lead, Business Development, Happiest Minds.
Avery Dennison, a global leader in materials science and digital identification solutions, demonstrated that RFID technology can fix supply chain inaccuracy and opacity. By embedding item-level RFID tags into garments or labels at the point of manufacture, brands and retailers can enable real-time inventory tracking. Alongside this, base. presented its role as an end-to-end multichannel management platform that helps sellers coordinate and scale their online operations. It acts as a central hub connecting various sales channels to Amazon’s fulfilment network. Through Amazon MultiChannel Fulfilment, retailers can pick, pack, and ship orders from Amazon warehouses even when sales come from other channels such as Shopify, marketplaces, or brand owned websites. This allows brands to work from a single inventory pool across channels, reduce warehousing needs, offer Prime-like delivery speeds, improve inventory turnover, and cut dead stock. The system also supports custom workflows and automates tasks such as invoicing, labelling, tracking, and order updates through a zero-code setup that can be implemented quickly.
As retail operations become more connected, the physical store itself is also being rethought. On the hardware side, Elo, recently acquired by Zebra Technologies for US $1.3 billion, showcased tools designed to support smart store environments. Its range includes touchscreen monitors, POS terminals, self-service kiosks, open-frame displays, and mobile computers, with screen sizes ranging from 5.5 to 65 inches, covering nearly every customer interaction point within a store. Elo Pay manages in-store payments, while EloView enables retailers to remotely deploy, update, and manage Android-based devices from a single platform.
Supporting this hardware layer, TVS Electronics presented its portfolio of POS hardware, billing software, and scanners built for businesses of different sizes and formats. Lipi, which supplies industrial barcode printers, demonstrated its mobile barcode printers and self-checkout kiosks, reinforcing how automation is extending even to smaller store formats.
Beyond store operations, retailers are also under pressure to manage expansion more efficiently. Sangam CRM, which already supports over 10,000 retail outlets, showed how its platform helps manage the full store expansion lifecycle. This includes centralising location scouting, enforcing new store opening checklists, and keeping corporate and field teams aligned through WhatsApp chatbots and Microsoft Teams integration. The platform also runs a unified
helpdesk and maintenance scheduling system, while integrating with Power BI for executive-level analytics and Zabbix for monitoring asset uptime and preventing disruptions.
Customer engagement was another key theme, particularly as retailers look to scale support without increasing headcount. Rootle demonstrated its voice AI platform, which enables natural, human-like conversations in the user’s preferred language.
| Customer engagement was another key theme, particularly as retailers look to scale support without increasing headcount. Regulatory readiness also featured strongly, especially with India’s new data protection framework coming into force. |
On the digital commerce front, the focus shifted to flexibility and speed. LOGIXAL presented its Composable Commerce Suite, which is built with a focus on Core Web Vitals, best-practice compliance, easy extensibility, and simple maintenance. Using a micro-frontend framework, the platform allows brands to adapt quickly while choosing from five ready templates designed for different business models, including Independent Store, Luxury, Multibrand Store, Department Store, and Marketplace.
Regulatory readiness also featured strongly, especially with India’s new data protection framework coming into force. Under the Digital Personal Data Protection Act, 2023, organisations are required to follow stricter rules on how personal data is collected, stored, and used. ETP made compliance a central part of its message at the summit, highlighting its SOC1 Type 2, SOC2 Type 2, and ISO 27001 certifications, which cover financial integrity, data security, and information security management.
Moreover, as stores become more digital, the physical environment itself remains critical to brand experience. Satin Neo Dimensions, an ISO-certified design-and-build firm, showcased its work across store interiors, signage, and wayfinding systems.
