RetailClub AI Festival 2026: a guide for retail planning teams

Who gets value from it — and who should skip it

The case for going rests on ownership. If you are the planning director or VP who has been handed the question — what should AI actually change in our forecasting, buying, and inventory process — a concentrated, AI-specific event is an efficient way to compress months of scattered vendor calls and reading into three days. The same holds if you are building the internal case for or against an AI-assisted planning tool and need to see the vendor field side by side, or if your leadership is pushing an AI agenda and you want to arrive at those conversations with firsthand context instead of secondhand summaries.

The case for skipping is just as concrete. This is not a planning-methodology event — nothing in the published pillars promises sessions on the mechanics of demand planning, allocation, or open-to-buy the way a dedicated planning conference does. If your team gets one event this cycle and needs proven, function-specific content, a young generalist AI festival is the riskier allocation. And if your organization has no live AI evaluation and no mandate to start one, the material will be interesting rather than actionable — which is a fine reason to read the recaps that will exist next year instead.

Reading the four pillars as a planning team

RetailClub organizes content into four pillars rather than functional tracks, so a planner has to translate. Build with AI is where your agenda time should concentrate: it is the natural home for anything on AI in demand forecasting, inventory optimization, replenishment, and the data infrastructure those depend on. When the session list publishes, this is the pillar to comb first for named planning and supply-side topics.

Lead with AI covers the questions a planning director owns even when the tooling belongs to someone else: how roles change when a forecast is machine-generated and human-adjusted, what gets centralized, how to run a team whose judgment work shifts from producing numbers to challenging them. Sell with AI is commerce-side and mostly adjacent — but personalization and agent-driven shopping change the shape of demand your plan has to absorb, so one or two sessions can earn their slot.

Live with AI, the consumer-behavior pillar, is easy to dismiss and should not be: if AI assistants mediate more purchase decisions, demand signals arrive differently — different timing, different concentration, different response to price. That is a planning problem before it is a marketing one.

How to work an event without a festival track record

There are no festival recaps or “best sessions from last year” lists — the only precedent is the smaller, retreat-format 2025 edition. That is not a reason to stay home; it is a reason to go with a scout’s brief rather than a delegate’s schedule. Some things are reasonably predictable from the founding team’s track record with Shoptalk and Groceryshop: production quality, curation, and a sponsor floor worth walking — the event states 250+ sponsors. What is genuinely unknown: how deep any session goes past executive framing, which functions actually show up in the audience, and whether the planning-relevant content is three sessions or thirty.

Two structural facts should shape your expectations. First, two stages running in parallel still means one person cannot cover everything — if two of you go, split by pillar, not by day. Second, a speaker list the event describes as roughly 80% C-level means strategy talks will outnumber practitioner mechanics. Plan to get the “how” from the sponsor floor and hallway conversations with peers, and the “where is this going” from the stages — not the reverse.

A preparation checklist for planners

Write your three questions before you book anything. A scouting trip without questions produces a notebook of adjectives. Good ones are specific to your plan: where would an AI-assisted forecast have to beat our current baseline to justify a pilot; what data readiness does each tool actually assume; how would a pilot run without disrupting the weekly planning cadence we already trust. If you have not measured your current forecast baseline, do that first — the forecast accuracy guide covers how — because every vendor claim you hear will be relative to a baseline, and you want it to be yours.

When the agenda publishes, search it for the planning-relevant terms rather than browsing by pillar: demand planning, forecasting, inventory, replenishment, supply chain. Mark those sessions first and build the rest of the schedule around them. Book vendor meetings before you arrive — at an event expecting 2,000+ attendees the meetings you want will schedule out — and favor vendors whose category you are actively evaluating over whoever has the largest stand.

Finally, decide the note-taking format in advance. One page per session or conversation: the claim made, the evidence offered, what it would mean for our plan, and a follow-up owner. Dull, and it is the difference between a readout and a trip report.

Turning three days into an internal readout

The output of a scouting trip is a decision document, not a summary. Within a week, write the one-page readout: what you saw, what maps onto your planning calendar in the next two quarters, what deserves a scoped pilot, and — just as valuable — what you are explicitly choosing to ignore and why. Tie every recommendation to a planning cycle and an owner. An “AI initiative” with no cycle attached is how conference energy dissipates by November.

Vendor conversations become a structured comparison: same columns for every tool you met — the planning problem it addresses, the data it assumes, the baseline it claims to beat, and the reference it offered. And keep the notes. If RetailClub earns a second edition, your 2026 readout is the recap that does not exist today — the document that makes next year’s go/no-go a ten-minute decision.

• ✓RetailClub AI Festival runs September 22–24, 2026 in Huntington Beach, founded by the Shoptalk and Groceryshop team — the pedigree, and the smaller inaugural 2025 retreat before it, are the trust signals for a young event.
• ✓For planning teams it is a scouting trip: go if you own an AI evaluation or roadmap; skip if you need proven planning-methodology content this cycle.
• ✓Of the four pillars, Build with AI is where forecasting, inventory, and demand-planning content should sit — comb it first when the agenda publishes.
• ✓Expect strategy over mechanics: the event states roughly 80% of speakers are C-level, so get the practitioner detail from the sponsor floor and peers.
• ✓Prepare three plan-specific questions, measure your forecast baseline before you go, and turn notes into a one-page readout tied to a planning cycle and an owner.

• RetailClub AI Festival — official site →
• Retail planning conferences — the full calendar compared →
• How to measure forecast accuracy — the baseline any AI pilot needs →
• How to plan a replenishment program →
• Retail math formulas reference →
• Free planning calculators →

Frequently asked questions

When and where is RetailClub AI Festival 2026?

RetailClub AI Festival runs September 22–24, 2026 in Huntington Beach, California. The format is an outdoor beachside boardwalk with two stages, organized around four content pillars: Build with AI, Lead with AI, Sell with AI, and Live with AI. The 2026 festival is the first full-scale edition: it follows RetailClub’s inaugural, smaller AI Deepdive Retreat, held in Huntington Beach in September 2025 with a stated 500 retail and brand leaders.

Who runs RetailClub?

RetailClub was co-founded by Anil D. Aggarwal and Simran Rekhi Aggarwal — the founders of Shoptalk and Groceryshop — together with co-founders and co-CEOs Caroline Farley and Krystina Gustafson. That pedigree — plus the inaugural 2025 AI Deepdive Retreat that preceded the festival — is the main trust signal for a young event: the team has built two of the larger recurring conferences in retail. The event states it expects 2,000+ attendees, 150+ speakers — roughly 80% C-level by its own count — and 250+ sponsors.

Is RetailClub worth attending for a retail planning team?

Treat it as a scouting trip rather than a proven planning conference. There are no published recaps or attendee reviews yet, so the honest case rests on the founding team and the AI-specific focus. It fits a planning leader who owns an AI evaluation or roadmap and wants a concentrated read on the vendor and executive landscape. It is a weaker fit if you need deep planning-methodology content, which the pillar framing does not promise.

How is RetailClub different from Shoptalk or NRF Big Show?

Scale and scope. NRF Big Show (January 10–12, 2027, Javits Center, New York) is the broad industry gathering — NRF states 41,000+ retail professionals from 100+ countries. Shoptalk Spring (March 22–24, 2027, Las Vegas) is commerce-focused — Shoptalk states around 10,000 attendees. RetailClub comes from the same founders as Shoptalk but is smaller and AI-specific: the event states 2,000+ expected attendees, with every content pillar framed around AI rather than retail generally.

Do sessions cover planning, inventory, and forecasting topics?

The published framing is the four pillars, not a functional track list, so there is no dedicated planning track to point to. Build with AI is the pillar where demand planning, forecasting, and inventory content would most naturally sit, and Lead with AI covers the organizational questions a planning director owns. How deep the agenda goes on planning specifically is the open question of a first festival edition — check the published agenda for named sessions before committing.