vinSUITE Names Steven Thomas to Lead R&D, Bringing Smarter Tools to Wine Clubs and Tasting Rooms
The Napa-based direct-to-consumer software company adds a senior technology leader to bring practical AI to the platform wineries run on every day.
NAPA, Calif., August 12, 2026 - vinSUITE, the direct-to-consumer software platform for wineries, has named Steven Thomas as Vice President of R&D and AI. Thomas will lead product engineering and own the platform’s push to bring AI into winery DTC software, not as a feature on a slide, but as tools wineries can actually trust and use.
Tasting room traffic still hasn’t bounced back, and keeping club members is only getting harder. For a winery, the software behind the wine club, the tasting room, and the online store is where the customer relationship lives, and it has to do more than record what already happened. vinSUITE has hired Steven Thomas to make that software smarter, and to put AI to work for wineries in ways that are practical.
“Our customers do not wake up thinking about software. They think about their wines and their members,” said Jimmy Wu, president of vinSUITE. “Our job is to make the tools behind that work quietly and well, and to be careful and honest about how we bring AI into them. Steven has spent his career building technology that people can depend on, and that is the mindset we want leading this work.”
Reinventing vinSUITE’s software starts with the problems wineries face every day: spotting which club members are about to cancel before they do, turning tasting room visits into follow-ups that convert, and giving small teams the kind of insight into their DTC business that usually takes a data analyst.
“The best technology should make the customer experience feel easier, smarter, and more personal. My focus at vinSUITE is to bring my experience across product innovation, eCommerce, payments, and AI to help wineries strengthen the relationships that keep members coming back, and grow their DTC business with confidence,” said Steven Thomas.
Thomas joins vinSUITE after leading technology as a chief technology officer across FinTech (banking, payments, and eCommerce), industrial IoT, and telecommunications. Across all of it, his focus has held: taking AI and machine learning from concept to dependable, in-production tools. He is a founding partner of the consulting firm The Forge and holds a degree in Computer Science from Western University.
For vinSUITE, the hire signals a continued investment in the platform that hundreds of wineries count on every day. With more than 20 years in the DTC wine business, the company brings together wine club management, eCommerce, point of sale through TabletPOS, and reporting through vinSIGHT on a single platform, and is now building the next layer of intelligence on top of it.
“Software for wineries has been about recording what happened, last month’s sales, who’s in the club, what’s in inventory,” said Wu. “The next step is software that helps wineries see what’s about to happen and do something about it. That’s where we’re headed, and that’s why Steven’s here.”
Learn more about vinSUITE at [vinsuite.com].
About vinSUITE
vinSUITE is a software platform built for winery direct-to-consumer and wine club operations. It brings wine club management, eCommerce, point of sale through TabletPOS, and analytics together on one platform, helping wineries sell directly to their customers and keep club members longer. With more than 20 years in the DTC wine business, vinSUITE works with wineries of every size. Learn more at [vinsuite.com].