The 3 next big things in commerce for 2025

A smooth retail experience depends on efficient shipping and hassle-free purchases, two elements that can create significant cost implications for retailers. These honorees in the commerce category are developing infrastructure that can make more efficient use of freight trucks, streamline theft detection, and ease the checkout process in warehouse club environments.

Flock Freight
For reducing inefficiency in truckloads
When it comes to freight trucks, wasted space is wasted money. Flock Freight estimates that the equivalent of one in three trucks runs empty because of inefficient deck-space utilization. The Certified B Corporation has built on its patented Shared Truckload technology, a kind of demand-side “carpooling for boxes,” with STL AddOns, which allow suppliers to dynamically add their compatible shipments even after a truck is en route, reducing costs for shippers and carriers while cutting emissions. One trucking customer says STL AddOns helped it achieve an 88% increase in earnings.

Sam’s Club
For automating the receipt-checking process
The popularity of warehouse clubs often leads to long lines as staffers ensure that customers’ items appear on the receipt. To speed things along, Walmart’s Sam’s Club has leveraged an array of cameras that point down at shoppers’ carts and use a proprietary computer vision algorithm that identities items using shape, size, color, and branding markers. The results are matched against a customer’s digital receipt within 400 milliseconds, eliminating the historic wait time when departing the store.

Toshiba Global Commerce Solutions
For reducing retail “shrink” without hassling shoppers
Retailers lose $100 billion to shoplifting, fraud, and just plain checkout error. The Toshiba Global Commerce Solutions ELERA Security Suite uses edge AI to help guard against this “shrink” at self-checkout lanes, produce scales, and grocery carts without bogging down the shopping process. The system also uses AI to help customers more easily ring up their own orders—by, for example, detecting the kind of unpackaged produce being checked out. In Toshiba’s 2024 fiscal year, ELERA processed more than 25 million transactions.

The companies and individuals behind these technologies are among the honorees in Fast Company’s Next Big Things in Tech awards for 2025. Read more about the winners across all categories and the methodology behind the selection process.

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