Inside the Tech Stack Behind the Modern Store with Yevgeni Tsirulnik & Naresh Keswani of Toshiba

**Joel Beasley** (0:00)
Today, we're talking to Yev and Naresh from Toshiba Global Commerce Solutions about all of the latest technology in the modern store and how they're making the business case for it. You're listening to Joel Beasley, Modern CTO.

**Joel Beasley** (0:19)
How are we doing, guys?

**Naresh Keswani** (0:20)
Hey, Joel.

**Yevgeni Tsirulnik** (0:21)
Hey, Joel.

**Joel Beasley** (0:22)
So right at the top, I just want to start with some introductions. Who you are, what you do at the company. Yev, could you go first?

**Yevgeni Tsirulnik** (0:30)
Yeah. My name is Yev, Yevgeni, but everyone calls me Yev. I lead our software line of business for Toshiba Global Commerce Solutions or TGCS. I basically cover all of the journey from ideation to the product, to innovation, sales, and delivery of the solutions. So I've been in retail for over two decades, close to probably 26, 27 years.
Enjoying it, loving it. Thanks for inviting me here. Yeah.

**Joel Beasley** (1:07)
Then Naresh?

**Naresh Keswani** (1:08)
Naresh Keswani, I lead the software portfolio in the software business at Toshiba Global Commerce Solutions.
My responsibility spans from product strategy, portfolio, ideating with the customers, and thinking about the capabilities that help retail modernization and scale globally. A lot of my focus today is really around Elera, that's our next generation platform, and increasingly how AI, edge intelligence, and agentic AI fundamentally change how retail software is built, deployed, and consumed globally. So in a lot of ways, Yev who's always thinking how retailers need to operate in the future, and in fact loves to break things, I need to think about how do we productize it, commercialize it, and then bring some guardrails around it. So it's been fun doing that for a little over nine years here in Toshiba.

**Joel Beasley** (2:17)
How long have you and Yev been collaborating together?

**Naresh Keswani** (2:21)
Four of those nine years.

**Joel Beasley** (2:22)
So you guys know each other. It's been a while.

**Naresh Keswani** (2:25)
Yeah.

**Yevgeni Tsirulnik** (2:25)
Yeah.

**Joel Beasley** (2:25)
Oh, very cool.

**Yevgeni Tsirulnik** (2:27)
Yeah. So in other words, from what Naresh said, I am the one that trying to think all the future and all the crazy ideas. Naresh is grounding me and balancing me and we work together for all this time very successfully.

**Joel Beasley** (2:44)
I think last year when I talked to Toshiba, they were talking about how previously it was a heavy investment in the digital, but now there is a large investment into the physical stores. Is that still happening?

**Naresh Keswani** (2:56)
That's fundamental, Joel.
In fact, if anything that we've seen and you just brought it up, right? I think the industry has spent the past decade digitizing the consumer journey. And what we are seeing is a tremendous shift in actually making the physical retail get digitized now. And that investment that was all around e-commerce, all around digital journeys, all buy-online pick up and store and returns modernization was great, at least in a lot of spaces that we operate.
Ninety plus percentage of either shopping or the influence towards that shopping is happening in the physical store. And retailers are realizing that the modernization of those platforms, of the physical retail is paramount. And even if the systems aren't broken as is, they're preventing them from making meaningful business decisions and driving higher revenue unless that investment is made. And that's what, to Yev's point, we've been doing successfully over the last few years, is inspiring retailers with where that modernization in physical space needs to happen. And how do you connect meaningfully and profitably the offline and online world?

**Joel Beasley** (4:23)
Are most people, most of the retailers, are they hungry for this? Are they lagging behind? What are you seeing a lot of out there?

**Yevgeni Tsirulnik** (4:30)
The marathon for the digitalization of basically know everything about the customer, know everything about the shopper, was all around the bet that e-commerce will take way more share in sales and in retail in general. So it was perfected.
They know everything about us in e-commerce, retailers, yet the store is where everything is happening. So to your point, those retailers are realizing that they can't take 10% of their sales and apply the same rules overall in the physical. So they have to go and know basically, they have to know the physical, not less that they know today, the digital world, or in other words, connect those things. So to me, retailers are basically going through that evolution of connecting the two worlds right now, getting these two businesses really working closely together.

**Joel Beasley** (5:41)
That's interesting, because if I were to have a conversation with either of you about heat map tracking on my website, click conversion, how long they stared at a certain section, whether they clicked the thing a bunch of times and it was broken, and all these triggers, you'd be like, yeah, we've been doing that for a decade. That's nothing new. That's been around and that's well understood. But are you saying that we're going to see parallels to that in the physical environment?