Tech Tuesday: Executive Appointments, New Apps

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Tech Tuesday: Executive Appointments, New Apps

By

Arthur Zaczkiewicz

Arthur Zaczkiewicz

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Tech Tuesday: Executive Appointments, New Apps

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This week, we hear that RetailMeNot is celebrating 20 years in business by launching a new “Rewards” app that is powered by AI and touts new deal-finding features. In other news, Infor has named a president and representative director for Infor Japan, which comes at a time when companies there are turning to tech solutions to address various issues, including supply chain disruptions. And Calico AI said it appointed Derek Galkin as its “chief momentum officer” to help expand its business in the apparel industry.

In other news, InstaLily said Adam Isenberg has joined the company as head of distribution, while PTC announced updates for its Arena PLM platform. And an analysis in the UK by Castles Technology reveals how the point-of-sale is changing with merchants demanding more capabilities.

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RetailMeNot, the online discount site , announced the launch of its new RetailMeNot Rewards app. The company is calling it the largest product transformation in the company’s history as it marks 20 years in business. The rebuilt app expands beyond one-off promo codes into loyalty, personalization and AI-driven shopping discovery.

The aim is to give shoppers more confidence that they’re getting the best available value.

The company said its research suggests consumers are not looking for yet another shopping app or another AI tool, but rather for certainty around outcomes—specifically best value. RetailMeNot reports that only 7 percent of shoppers make a purchase without researching first, while 59 percent compare prices, 43 percent search for coupons and more than half already use AI shopping tools to help inform smarter purchasing decisions.

The new Rewards app is designed to bring these behaviors together in a single experience built at the intersection of AI and e-commerce. Key features include a “Working Code Promise” that verifies discount codes before shoppers see them. There’s also a guaranteed minimum of 1 percent cash back across 3,500-plus merchants that can be stacked with eligible offers. And there are new AI features such as Scout Price and Smart Search.

Smart Search is an AI assistant intended to address common frustrations in discovery, using live queries against product and promo databases to avoid price or inventory hallucinations and presenting results through interactive “deal cards” and context-aware recommendations that stream progressively to users in real time.

Infor, an industry cloud software provider, said it appointed Yuka Kanemitsu as president and representative director of Infor Japan. In her new role, the company said Kanemitsu will oversee its strategic vision and day-to-day operations across Japan, focusing on accelerating customer success, deepening partner relationships and driving regional growth.

Kanemitsu’s appointment comes at a pivotal time as Japanese organizations increasingly turn to artificial intelligence, modern cloud applications and digital transformation to overcome ongoing labor shortages, supply chain disruptions and operational complexities.

Kanemitsu brings more than 25 years of enterprise technology leadership experience to Infor Japan. In her position, the company said she will prioritize expanding its footprint across key asset-intensive industries.

By deploying Infor’s Industry Cloud platform alongside industry-specific AI and intelligent automation, Kanemitsu aims to help Japanese enterprises modernize their systems and achieve measurable operational outcomes.

Calico AI appointed Derek Galkin as its chief momentum officer, which is a newly created role that is “focused on accelerating the company’s growth and expanding its brand partnerships across the apparel industry,” the company said in a statement.

Calico is an AI-powered product creation engine that helps apparel brands source, price and produce products faster.

Galkin brings over 20 years of brand-building experience. He is best known in the industry as a founding partner of SeaVees , the California footwear brand. During his career, he has worked with brands including Formula 1, Deckers, Oakley, Ford, Pantone, Todd Snyder and James Perse.

“I’ve spent my career building and reviving brands, and the one constant challenge has always been speed—getting the right product to market before the window closes,” said Galkin. “Calico is the solution for the efficiency problem in the apparel industry. I’m excited to help bring this to more brands and prove what’s possible when product creation finally moves at the speed the industry needs.”

Kathleen Chan, founder and chief executive officer of Calico, said Galkin “has spent his career inside the brands he’s building for—he knows exactly what it takes to get a product from concept to shelf and exactly where that process breaks down. That kind of instinct can’t be taught. It’s exactly what we need as we scale Calico to serve more brands across more categories.”

Galkin joins the company following Calico’s $15 million Series A funding round. The funding is helping the company accelerate development across its product creation engine that includes real-time pricing and production orchestration.

Center stage to expansion is Brand Vault, which is a newly launched capability giving brand teams instant access to institutional knowledge such as sales history, product specs, supplier data and more. This new capability is done in one place, and is no longer “scattered across spreadsheets or lost when employees leave.”

InstaLily, an AI company that helps distributors work more effectively, said Adam Isenberg has joined the company as head of distribution. The company said Isenberg has spent more than 14 years at the National Association of Wholesaler-Distributors, “where he worked closely with executives and operators across the industry.”

Isenberg will lead the company’s work with distributors while deepening the company’s industry partnerships and help shape its continued expansion across wholesale distribution.

“Isenberg’s mandate starts with a fact every operator knows,” the company said. “Every distributor has demand already inside the business. It arrives through requests for quotes, purchase orders, product searches, customer conversations and years of account history. Converting that demand into revenue still requires employees to assemble information across inboxes, ERPs, CRMs, catalogs, branch rules and the knowledge of experienced people.”

The company said that fragmentation slows quote response and adds manual work to every order, which makes it harder for sellers to see which customers are ready to buy. InstaLily tech solutions change all that. Isenberg said InstaLily “helps teams respond faster, complete more of the work, and see where attention is most likely to produce the next order. I joined because those are problems distributors feel every day.”

The company said its platform goes live in days inside the systems distributors already rely on, which includes Epicor Prophet 21, AS/400 environments, Salesforce, SAP, Oracle, email and internal applications. InstaLily said its platform learns “how each company prices, sells, approves and serves by bringing together product data, customer history, branch rules, approval logic and institutional knowledge.” The company added that the ERP stays in place as teams keep working the way they already do, in the screens and inboxes they are already using.

New research from Castles Technology, which offers Android payment acceptance solutions, reveals how the point-of-sale (POS) is being transformed by artificial intelligence and real-time transaction data capabilities. And in the U.K., researchers at the company said the POS is now a “central part” of how retailers and brands run their business.

“Merchants increasingly expect payment technology to support wider business operations, from customer insight and inventory management to deployment, maintenance and long-term scalability,” the company said in a statement. “Payment acceptance has therefore become the starting point compared to the previous notion of the finish line.”

Citing data from The Payments Association, the report noted that 90 percent of U.K. retailers are supporting mobile wallets. And with the removal of fixed £100 contactless limit earlier this year, banks can now set their own thresholds or even remove them completely.

“This opens higher-value transactions to contactless payments in sectors such as hospitality, healthcare and luxury retail,” the company said, adding that mid-market and enterprise retailers are increasingly requiring more advanced tech capabilities. And they also need payment platforms that can easily integrate with other technology such as CRM and e-commerce systems.

The company’s analysis also identified five factors that can strongly influence retailer satisfaction and loyalty when selecting POS technology. It includes: reliability and performance; ease of use; payment flexibility; integration with wider business systems and transparent pricing and support.

Jean-Philippe Niedergang, acting group CEO at Castles Technology, said that for years, the conversation centered on accepting more payment methods. “Today, that is simply the starting point. Merchants expect payment technology to become part of how they run their business. They want terminals that connect with wider operations, can be deployed and managed remotely and continue delivering value long after installation. Hardware has become table stakes.”

PTC has launched Arena Connect as part of its Arena product lifecycle management (PLM) and quality management system (QMS). Designed to bridge the gap between disconnected software applications across product development, manufacturing and operations, the new capability enables companies to automate data movement across enterprise platforms such as ERP, MES, Jira and even Slack.

The company said by reducing reliance on manual data entry and complex custom integrations, Arena Connect keeps critical cross-functional workflows, such as engineering change orders and quality management, automatically synchronized in real time.

PTC said the update includes a visual workflow builder and a library of more than 200 pre-built connectors as well as a centralized governance dashboard to monitor system logs and alerts. Beyond integration capabilities, the update introduces artificial intelligence enhancements—including AI Item Redline and automated bill-of-materials (BOM) compliance tools—to support supply chain resiliency and streamline document analysis.

PTC said these features advance its strategy for the “Intelligent Product Lifecycle,” enabling manufacturers to utilize a unified product data foundation to maintain quality, ensure regulatory compliance and accelerate time-to-market.

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