There’s a version of a software conference where you sit in hotel chairs, watch someone demo features you probably won’t remember, eat the included lunch, and go home. Nexus’26 wasn’t that.
More than a hundred independent retailers spent four days in Orlando at the end of April for the first HomeSource Systems user conference. And when they talked about what made the trip worth it, most of them didn’t lead with the sessions. They led with the other people in the room.
“I was concerned at first about stepping away for three or four days to come,” said Alisa Rode of All South. “It’s the best thing I ever could have done. We took a lot of takeaways, learned a lot of information. I wouldn’t hesitate to come back.”
There’s something a few days in a room together does that no other format quite matches: people running the same system, dealing with the same problems, finding different ways through them, and the time to actually compare notes. HomeSource CPO Greg White put it plainly during the keynote: “Understanding how one dealer uses HomeSource versus how another dealer uses HomeSource, to me, is invaluable.”
The reveal
The centerpiece of Nexus was the live introduction of HomeSource AI. Not a roadmap. Not a preview of what might be coming. The actual tools, in the actual system, shown to the retailers who’d be using them.
“These conventions are always good because it’s pretty difficult to understand what’s new unless you can go and see what’s new,” said David Romano of Snyder Diamond. “When you’re here for a few days, you’re going to see the releases and it becomes important to you.”
For anyone who’s watched AI get attached to every piece of software in the last few years and wondered whether any of it means anything for an independent retailer, the reaction in that room was a clear answer.
“AI is here to stay. We all hear it. It’s not just a throwaway term getting tacked on to everything out there,” said Eric Beiter of ADC. “It is something that’s going to help their business become more efficient so they can free up their time and their employees’ time and look at different ways to grow and be more successful.”
HomeSource introduced the AI suite across three areas of the business. In the back office, AI Reporting gives operators natural language access to their own data: AI Sales Analysis for quick insights and custom queries, GL AI Analysis to surface general ledger anomalies before they compound, and Ask Doc for querying documents the way you’d ask a person a question. The number behind the session: 73 percent of enterprise data goes unused for analytics. Most independent retailers aren’t getting insights from their own numbers because pulling them requires time and staff they don’t have.
On the sales floor, AI Sales Teams works inside the POS. AI Product Compare handles spec lookups without leaving the system. AI Compliance Analysis runs rules and panel checks, AI Ticket Readiness flags what’s missing before a sale closes, and a Compliance Reporting dashboard shows what’s happening across the team. The session was led by two people who, between them, have nearly 18 years of experience working with independent retailers, which meant the questions from the room got real answers.
“Sales Analysis and Product Compare. I’m going to point right at those for us rather immediately, because I think those are real weaknesses,” said Tom Mott of Appliance Direct. “When you talk about younger and inexperienced sales staff, that has a lot to do with our current makeup. The product compare is a huge factor when you’re talking about inexperienced sales staff.”
In delivery and scheduling, Jarvis handles zone routing by zip code, truck assignment logic, scheduling guardrails, and route optimization, with customer self-scheduling on the roadmap. The stat that resonated with anyone who’s felt the cost of a failed delivery: 41 percent of all supply chain costs happen in the last mile. Better scheduling upstream is how that number moves.
The keynote also announced e-commerce version two, a complete rebuild of HomeSource Commerce from the ground up on React. AI-powered search across products and content, single-page checkout, Apple Pay, and a self-service editor so retailers can make site changes without filing a support ticket. Rollout starts with select retailers around September, with HomeSource already reaching out to those who want to move first.
Then came the part that didn’t make it into any pre-conference email. Greg introduced AI Workers, what the team calls the first agentic AI system built for this industry, with a framing simple enough to stick: “If you do something more than twice, you should look to automate it.” Not another tool to open. An engine that runs workflows inside the platform on its own: stale quote follow-ups sent every morning, overdue accounts flagged and put on hold, missing purchase orders surfaced before deliveries fall short, a daily business digest in the owner’s inbox before the store opens. Retailers can run the workflows HomeSource built, or write their own in plain language using the same rules they’d give a new employee. “That is getting back home at six o’clock at night,” Greg said. “Not having to go into the office maybe every Saturday.”
The evening closed with a private networking dinner on the top floor of the hotel, conversations from the breakout rooms carrying over into something more relaxed, retailers swapping stories while Epcot’s Luminous fireworks lit up the skyline. It’s the kind of setting where the best connections get made. Not in a session. Over a meal, at the end of a long day, with people who actually understand what you’re dealing with.
Getting into the system
Beyond the AI reveal, Nexus ran dozens of breakout sessions across three rooms over two full days. Not demos. Working sessions: trainers in the room, the system open, retailers running through the parts of the business they deal with every week.
“We had two of us here,” said John Schindler of Garner Appliance. “We kind of conquered and divided, hit different workshops, and felt like we hit the key things that apply to our business. Your whole team was here. I just walked up to someone with a Nexus shirt on and asked, ‘How do I do this?’ Even this morning, I had my main guy in the warehouse get kicked out of his PocketScan, and I just turned and said, ‘How do I get him back on?'”
Knowing that whoever you need has an answer is part of what makes a conference like this different from anything you can get remotely.
“This is the ability for us to focus just on the tool that helps us do our job every single day,” said Joseph Legato of Bill & Rod’s Appliance. “Seeing the AI systems, seeing the integrations you can do with accounting, that’s just really invaluable stuff.”
The sessions covered the full arc of the operation: accounting, inventory, purchasing, payments, service, delivery, and digital. Some were foundational; others went deep into advanced workflows teams were already using. Retailers moved between rooms based on where they had the most ground to cover.
Some of the deepest sessions went into accounting territory that independent retailers often avoid because doing it manually is a grind. The Plaid sessions covered connecting bank accounts, live bank feeds, automated deposit posting, and the full credit card reconciliation lifecycle, built around one uncomfortable fact: small business owners spend an average of 120 hours a year on manual bookkeeping. That work doesn’t have to stay manual.
The accounting sessions also covered APQ, the AI invoice queue, which parses vendor bills, matches serial numbers and costs against purchase orders, and posts to the ledger without manual data entry. It wasn’t new to everyone in the room.
“There are retailers here that have already processed millions of dollars worth of invoices in the system,” Jimmy said on stage. “Hundreds and hundreds of invoices. Zero rejections.”
Review Management made a different case. HomeSource Commerce’s automated review requests pull directly from the sales workflow, routing satisfied customers to Google, Yelp, Facebook, or the BBB and flagging unhappy ones before they post publicly. Ninety-eight percent of consumers check reviews before choosing a local business. The session made the case that review management isn’t a marketing project. It’s part of running the store.
“The reviews section is a lot easier to do,” said Todd George of Kleckners & Sons. “We’ve tried different processes. We would give customers QR codes to scan to help them get to where they’re supposed to review, and a lot of them just don’t. I like the idea that as soon as we invoice that job, it will automatically send out to an email or a text and ask the customer to rate how our company did.”
Who shows up to something like this
The retailers who came to Orlando came to work. One-on-one support sessions were running before the main programming even started. People stayed in the back of the room after sessions to ask about their specific setups. Retailers came in with a list of questions and left with answers they could actually use.
“What made me decide to come was having such a good team,” said Chris Chambers of Davie’s Appliance. “I’ve become friends with a lot of the team at HomeSource, and I just wanted to learn more. This is a growing company. Davie’s Appliance is a growing company. I think we go hand in hand. I just wanted to meet everyone, see everyone up close and personal, and really see where the future will take us.”
“I’m in a market where there’s a lot of resistance to change from businesses I compete against,” said Ryan Simon of ABW. “So the fact that I’m willing to look at these things and get ahead of this always gives me the advantage.”
That’s the version of a user conference worth building, and worth coming back to.
Nexus’27
This was the first one. Nexus’27 is already in planning.
If you’re a HomeSource client and want to be on the list when registration opens, reach out to your account manager.
If you missed Orlando and want to see what had retailers talking on the way home.
