By Vishal Kirpalani | Chief Product Officer, DemandTec | April 2026
5-minute read
The era of the point solution in retail is over. Not fading. Over.
Retailers have made real investments: modern pricing engines, sophisticated promotion platforms, automated pricing workflows. The tools are better than they’ve ever been. And yet margin is still leaking. Not because of poor execution, but because the internal stack was never the whole problem. The question has shifted from “which pricing tool is best” to “how do we build a system where decisions made with CPG partners are connected to every other part of the commercial platform before a single dollar is committed?” That is not a software selection question. That is an architecture question.
Margin Is Leaking in the Handoff
A retailer can have a world-class pricing engine, a modern promotions platform, and a sophisticated pricing tool, and still be making pricing decisions without knowing what CPG partners are willing to fund. The result is predictable: promotional calendars built against assumed trade dollars rather than committed ones; reconciliation happening months after the execution window closes; margin leaking in the gap between internal strategy and external supplier alignment.
CPG partners fund 40 to 60% of every promotional event. If the system managing your pricing and promotional strategy has no live visibility into what those partners are ready to commit before the plan is built, then no amount of internal optimization closes the gap. The most sophisticated internal stack in the industry is still incomplete if it ends at your own walls.
“Collaboration is not a feature layer sitting on top of the commercial platform. It is the lynchpin that holds a multi-product ecosystem together, the connective tissue that turns sophisticated tools into a genuinely connected decisioning environment.”
— Vish Kirpalani, CPO, DemandTec
Collaboration Is the Lynchpin
At DemandTec, we believe Collaboration is not a feature layer sitting on top of the commercial platform. It is the connective tissue that turns a sophisticated set of tools into a genuinely connected decisioning environment.
Remove it, and a connected platform is a sophisticated collection of silos. Embed it properly, as a structural layer where retailer strategy and CPG investment are aligned before a single promotional dollar is committed, and the entire system starts to function the way unified decisioning is supposed to.
Our market evaluation found no platform today that operates as a genuinely shared decisioning environment across both sides of the retailer-CPG relationship. That gap is precisely the opportunity we are building into.
01. From Deal Processing to Deal Performance
Most platforms in this space are built around operational efficiency: automating the mechanics of deal creation, submission, and approval. That solves the wrong problem.
The right problem is evaluating every deal as a strategic investment before it is committed. What is the likely uplift? What is the projected ROI relative to the trade investment? How does this deal compare to historical events in this category? The goal is not faster deal processing. It is smarter deal-making: transforming the commercial negotiation from an administrative task into a margin-generating decision with clear, quantifiable outcomes on both sides of the table.
02. The Offer Intelligence Nobody Has Fully Integrated — Until Now
In any trade program, there are three distinct pools of promotional capital: CPG retailer-specific funded offers, CPG national funded offers, and retailer-funded offers. These three pools have historically lived in separate systems, or in spreadsheets, invisible to the pricing and promotional decisions they’re meant to support.
Consolidating all three into a unified offer intelligence layer, available before a single pricing or promotional decision is made, changes what is possible. A pricing decision made with full visibility into every promotional dollar available to support it is a categorically better decision. That visibility should exist before the plan is built, not after it executes.
“A pricing decision made with full visibility into every promotional dollar available to support it is a categorically better decision. That visibility should exist before the plan is built, not after it executes.” — Vish Kirpalani, CPO, DemandTec
03. The Network That Took 25 Years to Build
DemandTec’s 7,800+ connected CPG partners represent an infrastructure that cannot be replicated on a product cycle timeline. It took 25 years to build. No competitor replicates it on a product cycle, and this is not a modest claim. It is the structural moat that makes everything else in the platform more defensible and more valuable.
Built on that network, a genuinely shared growth planning environment changes the category conversation from reviewing what happened last year to building forward-looking strategy on shared data, shared scenarios, and shared performance targets. And the intelligence to close the margin gap between what was committed in a trade agreement and what was ultimately claimed, flagging discrepancies before they become disputes and producing audit-ready settlement records both parties trust, converts a chronic operational cost into a source of competitive advantage.
One more thing worth stating plainly: the AI-native interface in DemandTec is not the product. The intelligence comes from 25 years of demand science, deep ML models trained on retail-specific data, and the offer intelligence layer that makes every promotional dollar visible in context. What the AI interface does is make that intelligence accessible to every person who needs to act on it, in the moment they need it, not after the window closes.
The Decisioning Leap
The retailers who will outperform in the next cycle are not the ones who found the best individual tools. They are the ones who stopped thinking in tools and started thinking in connected processes, where pricing, promotions, trade funds, and CPG partnerships operate from a single commercial intelligence layer.
The question for any retail executive evaluating their commercial stack is not whether their pricing engine is best in class. It is whether their pricing engine knows what their CPG partners are ready to fund before the plan is built. That is the decisioning leap, and it is available now.
That is what we are building at DemandTec. And we welcome the conversation with anyone who wants to understand what it means for their business specifically.
Get the independent analyst perspective.
According to research by Ananda Chakravarty, Research Vice President, Retail Merchandising and Marketing Analytics Strategies, IDC (US54428526-IS, April 2026), 55% of grocery retailers cite insufficient collaboration with CPG partners as their number one supply chain gap. Download the IDC Info Snapshot for the full picture.
→ Download at demandtec.com/idc-trade-funds
Want to talk through what this means for your business?
We welcome the conversation. Reach out to start it.
→ Contact us at demandtec.com/contact-us/
