When people ask me what RetailClub is like, it can be hard to describe.
Almost everything about RetailClub AI Festival is different—the format, the setting, the pace, the quality of conversation—so if you try to map it against other B2B events, you’ll undersell it to yourself before you arrive. The reference points simply don’t transfer. To understand it, you have to completely let go of your preconceived notions of what an industry event is.
While it’s sometimes hard to put into words, when you arrive on site, you instantly feel the difference. You’re outside, next to the ocean, in an environment custom built for the right combination of serendipitous and structured connections. You’re not rushing from one thing to the next, trying to jam in a conversation in a dark hallway.
It’s an environment where the right conversations can’t help but happen. Where the physical space does so much work that the experience feels effortless. This allows people to show up with a level of vulnerability, honesty, and openness that doesn’t exist at other events, as my co-founder Caroline Farley recently wrote about.
A critical piece of the RetailClub AI Festival experience is The Boardwalk, a 1/3-mile, open-air promenade running alongside Huntington Beach’s Pacific coastline. It serves as the connective tissue of the Festival, with the ocean as a constant backdrop.
Here’s why we built it, what it includes, and why it matters.
It’s an environment where the right conversations can’t help but happen. Where the physical space does so much work that the experience feels effortless.
The AI Playground Pavilion
One of the key features of the Boardwalk is the AI Playground. This is where AI stops being a theory and starts becoming tangible. Inside, three distinct areas each serve a different purpose.
The AI Current is where theory becomes practice. Sessions feature live demonstrations of real-world AI tech and implementations, with technologists, retailers, and brands walking through exactly how they’re using AI to drive growth, improve efficiencies, and deliver a better customer experience.
The AI Sandbox runs more like a mastermind group than a panel. These are small, expert-led group sessions among peers, where participants actively shape the conversation—trading practical insights, pressure-testing ideas, and talking candidly about what’s working and what isn’t.
The Level Up Area is built for professional development and leadership conversations that help you navigate a period of massive transformation. Interactive sessions focus on the hard and soft skills needed to adapt and thrive in an AI era: training on specific AI tools, or workshops that sharpen your leadership skills.
The Festival Stages
The Ocean and Horizon stages feature prominently on the Boardwalk. These Festival stages are where big ideas live. They’re built for inspiration and possibility, and for challenging attendees to look ahead to where AI is headed in the long term—which is now measured in months.
Stage sessions cover AI across every dimension: the business you run, the team you lead, the customers you serve, and the economic and societal forces remaking the industry. They push you to move past checkbox AI strategies, incremental thinking, and leaving conferences feeling comfortable.
The Breakthru Meetings Pavilion
The number one reason people come to industry events is to meet the right people. The Breakthru Meetings Pavilion is designed around that fact, allowing you to meet with any attendee for any reason.
A dedicated meeting space at the end of the Boardwalk hosts 30,000 pre-scheduled, double opt-in 1:1 meetings—powered by the best networking technology, not the cheapest. Retailers, brands, tech companies, investors, and other industry stakeholders sit across from each other with a shared reason to be there. Every meeting is matched by mutual interest and AI-powered recommendations.
The format creates intentionality in a way that open networking simply cannot replicate. You both know why you’re meeting, and you have 15 minutes to figure out whether it goes somewhere. More often than you’d expect, it does.
The format creates intentionality in a way that open networking simply cannot replicate.
Breakthru Experiences
Some of the best connections happen in smaller group settings when people come together with a shared interest—and we’ve designed 50+ Breakthru Experiences along the Boardwalk to make those moments possible at scale.
The range is intentional. You can make Vietnamese spring rolls with a group of peers you just met, shake your own cocktail at a mixology session, taste wines while talking through AI personalization strategies, or sit down for an oceanfront breakfast focused on the future of AI in stores. There’s a beach bootcamp, guided meditation, a Women in AI lounge, live podcast recordings, and more.
The through-line is connection through shared experience. When you’re learning to make gourmet pizza alongside someone facing a similar problem, the conversation that follows is almost never about the pizza. These aren’t side events—they’re a core part of how RetailClub helps you build real relationships.
Sponsor & Partner Spaces
Some of the most interesting destinations on the Boardwalk aren’t ours. They belong to the partners who’ve built their own experiences within the Festival. A few marquee spaces we’re particularly excited about include:
AWS Retail Grounds is a curated multizone showcase of how AWS’s community of industry partners are helping retailers move beyond experimentation and lead retail’s full-scale AI transformation. Explore an open-format space featuring live tech demos, an AI Lounge, AWS Theatre, Retail Bodega, executive roundtables, and immersive activations—all designed to connect retailers with some of the most innovative technology companies reinventing modern commerce, powered by AWS.
Retail AI Council has built the Retail AI Council Beach House as an invite-only space for honest, practitioner-led conversations. At its core are “Council Collab IRL” sessions: in-person collaborative roundtables where retail leaders share real-world AI wins, challenge each other’s assumptions, and work through the harder questions about adoption and organizational change.
VMG’s AI Commerce Hub is a fully produced walk-through pavilion that brings together a curated group of VMG portfolio companies as a unified ecosystem. The space is organized around a shopper journey framework—each company owns a distinct problem in the shopper journey, so visitors move through a connected narrative. The result is a clearer picture of how the pieces fit together to solve real retail problems.
Bringing It All Together
The Boardwalk is central to our thesis about what a modern retail event should feel like–an environment where every part of the experience creates the conditions for real connection. And a big part of what makes it so impactful is the combination of the planned and the unplanned.
Thousands of meetings and experiences are pre-scheduled and purposefully matched, so you’re not leaving connection to chance. But the schedule is also paced so that when you run into someone between sessions, you actually have time to sit down and talk.
It’s the structure that creates the conditions, and the space that lets something real happen inside them. We hope you’ll be a part of it–I’m certain this is the start of a completely new era of retail events.
Join us and 2,000+ retail industry leaders and trailblazers at RetailClub AI Festival, September 22–24, 2026, Huntington Beach, CA.
Author
Krystina Gustafson Co-Founder & Co-CEO, RetailClub Krystina Gustafson is the Co-Founder and Co-CEO of RetailClub, the only retail event built on the conviction that AI isn’t just transforming the industry, but is reshaping the economy, society, and culture that underpin it. She was previously SVP of content at Shoptalk and Groceryshop, a retail reporter at CNBC, and a web editor at Women’s Wear Daily.
Disclaimer: This article was written by me … with the help of AI (Claude Sonnet 4.6, to be specific). If we’re building an event about how AI is transforming retail, we’d be hypocrites not to use it ourselves. At RetailClub, we’re testing and deploying AI at every stage of the business: from how we research and write, to how we design, plan, and deliver events. And no, I refuse to stop using em dashes. I’m a former reporter. I was overusing them long before AI showed up.
