ECRS® Unveils Breakthrough Practical AI Pilot Results at The NGA Show 2026, Showcasing Significant Basket Lift Using Native CATAPULT® Tools

Las Vegas, NV — February 18, 2026 —ECRS® experts took center stage at The NGA Show 2026, delivering two high impact presentations focused on a rapidly emerging priority for retailers: using practical AI tools to drive customer segmentation and personalization, ultimately creating significant basket lift. While AI’s potential is widely recognized, ECRS emphasized that its effectiveness depends on clean, unified, and complete data, strengths inherent to the CATAPULT® unified transaction platform and the CATAPULT Cognition® reporting and analytics suite. These presentations focused on practical AI tools rapidly emerging as a powerful resource and a priority for independent retailers.

During the event, ECRS revealed results from a groundbreaking AI pilot study performed by the ECRS Applied Intelligence & Research Team that demonstrated how AI powered segmentation and personalized offers can shift shopper behavior and generate substantial revenue lift when built on a strong data foundation.

AI Segmentation Built on Unified Retail Data – Testing at Scale

Using advanced clustering capabilities, ECRS analyzed 42,000 shoppers and organized them into distinct behavioral clusters. These clusters drew on a wide array of structured data captured throughout the CATAPULT® ecosystem. This level of insight allows retailers to deliver personalization at scale while improving engagement, loyalty, and store performance.

Pilot Results: Reactivating Lapsed Shoppers with Personalized Offers

To measure the real-world impact of AI-driven personalization, ECRS conducted a controlled pilot targeting shoppers who had not visited in more than 30 days. The study evaluated 6,000 shoppers evenly divided into three AI-generated segments, with randomized target and control groups. Over a ten-day promotional period and four weeks of post offer evaluation, the results were striking.

Targeted shoppers generated $171,025.68 in sales compared to $78,727.32 from the control group, a total lift of $92,298.36. With offer costs of just $1,183, the pilot delivered a net revenue gain of $91,115.36, representing $30.37 of added value per targeted shopper. Spending among targeted shoppers increased 117% over the control group, and average basket size rose 27.1%.

These results provide clear evidence that personalized and practical AI-driven offers can meaningfully influence shopper behavior when supported by accurate data and a unified system.

CATAPULT Cognition® + CATAPULT® Loyalty: Harnessing the Power of Practical AI

The findings highlight a central challenge for many retailers: fragmented systems often produce inconsistent or incomplete data, making AI unreliable. CATAPULT Cognition, fully integrated with the CATAPULT retail automation suite, and the CATAPULT loyalty suite, solves this problem by providing a unified, accurate data environment along with automated segmentation tools and seamless personalization workflows. Retailers gain actionable insights in a clear, digestible, and accessible manner.

Together, CATAPULT Cognition and the CATAPULT Loyalty Suite make AI tools practical, accessible, and essential for delivering the level of personalization today’s shoppers expect.

ECRS’ AI pilot demonstrates that when advanced analytics are paired with high-quality retail data, the results speak for themselves, clear revenue growth, stronger shopper engagement, and practical AI tools that deliver measurable value for independent retailers of all sizes.

About ECRS

Family-owned since 1989, ECRS is a Certified Evergreen® retail transactions and artificial intelligence solutions provider, offering simple, practical solutions that unify operations and empower independent retailers to thrive. ECRS’ revolutionary CATAPULT® POS platform, powered by Unified Transaction Logic®, is the market’s only truly unified transaction platform that seamlessly connects all retail touchpoints. With CATAPULT, all retail touchpoints—including point of sale, back office, self-checkout, deli scale, fuel pump, pharmacy, inventory, loyalty, eCommerce, and enterprise management—share one single transactional logic. Unifying hardware, software, and services, ECRS offers friction-free, cost-saving solutions that make advanced automation accessible while transforming the consumer experience.