RESEARCH TRIANGLE PARK, N.C., Nov. 05, 2026 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) -- Toshiba Global Commerce Solutions today announced that the ELERA® Commerce Platform earned three top rankings in IHL Group’s 2026 Retail POS and mPOS Software Market report, including #1 among vendors in AI, ML and Agentic capabilities, Architecture, and in the Grocery & Fresh segment. Among the vendors evaluated, Toshiba led the AI category by a clear margin over the next-ranked vendor. The findings come as retailers are looking beyond traditional POS capabilities toward more intelligent, adaptable technology that can support how stores operate and evolve.
IHL’s research finds that the market has increasingly converged around core selling and unified commerce capabilities, shifting the competitive battleground to areas such as store resilience, the boundary between POS and order management, implementation speed, global expansion, and how much AI is operating in production today.
“Toshiba was among the AI leaders in our evaluation last year, and this year they’ve moved to the top in this categorization,” said Jerry Sheldon, VP of Technology at IHL Group. “Retailers are already seeing the value of ELERA® vision and loss-prevention AI in their stores. Backed by a well-defined agentic roadmap and strong internal governance, Toshiba is well positioned for future retailer-facing applications. ELERA® gives retailers a common foundation for adopting new capabilities and building their own applications, with shared retail data, transaction logic, and development tools.”
AI in retail is shifting from experimentation to execution, as more retailers integrate the technology into everyday operations to improve efficiency, optimize decision-making, and drive measurable business outcomes.
“Retailers are adopting AI to solve individual problems, but each new solution can bring another platform, another integration and another set of data to manage,” said Yevgeni Tsirulnik, SVP Grocery, General Merchandising & Innovation at Toshiba Global Commerce Solutions. “ELERA® provides a shared platform so intelligence from one application can inform others. Our ‘build on buy’ approach lets retailers adopt proven solutions and use the same underlying commerce services to develop their own applications and workflows. Our agentic roadmap accelerates that development, helping retailers turn their ideas into working capabilities faster.”
The IHL findings also provide a timely backdrop for conversations at NRF, where Toshiba will share its perspective on the evolving role of AI, architecture, and intelligence across the store. Read the report excerpt here to learn more about Toshiba’s leadership standings, including top-tier rankings for Installation and Integration capabilities and the Food, Convenience, Drug, and Mass Merchandise markets.
About IHL Group
IHL Group is a global research and advisory firm specializing in technologies for the retail and hospitality industries. For over 25 years, IHL has provided market sizing, technology benchmarking and strategic advisory services to the world’s leading retailers and technology vendors. IHL’s Sophia database tracks more than 500,000 technology installations across 6,000-plus retailers in 300-plus categories, providing deployment data at a level of detail unmatched in the industry. IHL’s core products include REAP enterprise research subscriptions, WorldView forecasting models and ClearSight AI readiness assessments, giving clients a quantitative foundation for technology investment decisions. For more information, visit www.ihlservices.com.
About Toshiba Global Commerce Solutions:
Toshiba Global Commerce Solutions empowers retail to thrive and prosper through a dynamic ecosystem of smarter, more agile solutions and services that enable retailers to resiliently evolve with generations of consumers and adapt to market conditions. Supported by a global organization of devoted employees and partners, retailers gain more visibility and control over operations while enjoying the flexibility to build, scale, and transform retail experiences that anticipate and fulfill consumers’ ever-changing needs.
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Toshiba Global Commerce Solutions is a wholly owned subsidiary of Toshiba Tec Corporation, which is traded on the Tokyo Stock Exchange.
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Toshiba Global Commerce Solutions
Elizabeth Romero / Amy Gray
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