When Walmart made about 200,000 products purchasable inside ChatGPT, it drew the whole e-commerce world’s attention. Then, the numbers came in.
The retailer confirmed that, within ChatGPT, conversion was three times lower for products sold directly in the chatbot than for those that sent shoppers on to a retailer’s website. At Morgan Stanley’s technology conference on March 4, Daniel Danker, Walmart’s EVP of AI acceleration, called the feature “a very temporary moment in time”.
That episode is a useful lens for RetailClub AI Festival, which opens tomorrow, September 22. It runs through September 24 in Huntington Beach, and is expecting more than 2,000 retail industry leaders to be in attendance. Among the sponsors, Nisum will host two sessions, on Sept. 23 and 24, built around the distance between AI pilots and production.
RetailClub has quickly grown to be one of the industry’s must attend conferences. The organization was originally launched in 2019, and was relaunched this past year in June of 2025.
Anil D. Aggarwal and Simran Rekhi Aggarwal, the founders of Shoptalk and Groceryshop, announced it, with Caroline Farley and Krystina Gustafson also being Co-Founders. Krystina Gustafson and Caroline Farley are the CEOs of the organization.
Its first event after re-launching, an AI Deepdive Retreat on Sept. 14-17 this past year, brought together 500 leaders and offered more than 5,000 prescheduled one-on-one meetings.
When it comes to the festival itself, there are a number of insights for decision makers and AI leaders to watch out for. First, is that shopping discovery moving into AI faster than most retail teams planned for. Adobe Analytics found traffic from AI sources to U.S. retail sites up 393% year over year in the first quarter of 2026, after a 693% jump over the holidays. Salesforce also credits AI and agents with 20% of 2025 holiday retail sales.
RetailClub is putting numbers like these in front of a room on Wednesday: Merkle’s global chief strategy officer, Holden Bale, is expected to present research on more than 100 billion-dollar enterprises showing 88% have deployed AI, yet only 6% can link it directly to EBITDA gains.
And in a separate session, Minted’s chief operating officer, Sarah Veit Wallis, will walk through what it actually took to train AI to hold the retailer’s brand voice consistently across customer interactions, rather than assume the tools do it out of the box.
The second is a correction: OpenAI, it appears in the retail space, has moved away from Instant Checkout and is working with retailers on dedicated apps inside ChatGPT, after onboarding merchants proved arduous and the feature was prone to errors, according to a Forrester analyst; roughly 30 Shopify merchants were live at one point. Walmart’s replacement is a Sparky-powered app in ChatGPT where shoppers link their accounts and loyalty memberships and check out through Walmart’s own payment systems. Axios summed up the current state as AI largely shaping what people decide to buy, while the purchase itself mostly stays with the retailer. RMW Commerce’s Rick Watson is discussing this on Tuesday, Watson Live!, presented with Kibo, putting senior operators on record about where AI actually belongs in the transaction.
Scot Wingo, who runs the Retailgentic podcast, is also expected to record a companion session on Thursday on this topic.
The third sits under the other two: most companies have AI, and few have scaled it. Gartner has forecast that more than 40% of agentic AI projects will be canceled by the end of 2027, citing escalating costs, unclear business value or inadequate risk controls.
That is the ground covered by Nisum’s “From Pilot to P&L: An Unfiltered Guide for Retail Technology Leaders.” Nisum board member Sajid Mohamedy will present it twice, at booth #312 on Sept. 23 and 24, and it examines why some retail AI pilots stall and what separates them from initiatives that continue into the next budget cycle.
The same tension shows up elsewhere on the schedule: BlackFinn Partners’ Dave Finnegan, who spent fifteen years as Build-A-Bear’s CIO before advising retailers on AI investment, appears twice on Wednesday, once on his own career path and once alongside Quantum Metric on what it takes to scale AI responsibly once the pilot phase ends.
Data readiness is the least glamorous item on the agenda, and it probably decides the rest. eMarketer reported in January that messy product data and system silos were stalling OpenAI’s plan to monetize ChatGPT through commerce. Operations are where agents already look useful: Salesforce said they handled a 142% surge in tasks such as returns and shipping updates last holiday season. Nisum, which has worked in retail and commerce for more than 25 years and has more than 1,500 engineers and consultants, lists AI-powered margin growth and unified, agent-ready commerce among its four retail focus areas.
Whatever the festival produces this week, it’s clear that AI is having a big impact on this industry.
It’s clear that the retailers and tech leaders who leave Huntington Beach with a number attached to their AI bets will be the ones setting next year’s budget conversations, not just attending them.
