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Executives across retail call AI a top priority, yet very few can say what it has returned. In a June 2026 Deloitte survey, in fact, of 200 retail and consumer products executives, 75% named AI a top strategic priority, but only 16.5% could quantify a return from it. That gap is the backdrop for the RetailClub AI Festival this week, opening Tuesday at Huntington Beach, California, and running through Thursday, September 24. The event involves an all-outdoor boardwalk lined with sponsor activations and its organizers, the founders of Shoptalk and Groceryshop, expect around 2,000 attendees and more than 150 speakers. The promise: retail has to move past AI experimentation. So the question hanging over the week is simple. Will retail’s AI pilots still be around after their first serious budget review? Money isn’t an obstacle. At least not yet. Deloitte found that 82% of executives it surveyed plan to increase AI investment over the next 12 months, most of it still going to IT and data infrastructure, rather than to use cases that generate revenue or protect margin.For founders who sell into retail, the sharper question is who on the buyer’s side owns the result. That person ends up deciding what gets renewed, and throughout firms large and wide, it isn’t the one who championed the pilot. Nisum, one of the technology providers on the boardwalk this week, has built two sessions around exactly that problem. The Gap Between Priority and ProofThe Deloitte numbers show how wide the distance is between intent and execution: about half of respondents invest less than 0.5% of revenue in AI, while enterprise-wide deployment sits between 7% and 10% for both retail and consumer goods companies. Outside of IT, wide adoption never exceeds 36% in any function. Ownership is perhaps where the survey gets most interesting. In 54% of the companies, AI strategy sits with technology leaders rather than with the P&L owners who have to deliver business results from it. Here, a founder can win a pilot on technical merit with the first group and still lose the renewal to the second without ever having sat across from them.Wider research leans the same way. MIT’s Project NANDA reported in mid-2025 that 95% of the generative AI pilots it examined delivered no measurable profit-and-loss impact, as reported by Fortune, based on 300 public deployments. Gartner, meanwhile, predicted in June last year that more than 40% of agentic AI projects will be canceled by the end of 2027, citing escalating costs, unclear business value and inadequate risk controls. Those are management problems more than model problems. But in fairness, retail isn’t uniformly stuck. Most respondents in both sectors say the biggest impact so far has come in productivity and cost reduction, with retail participants far likelier than consumer goods ones to report revenue growth – 38% against 10%. Deloitte’s advice to closing the gap is to put strategy in the hands of P&L owners and to treat scaling, not piloting, as the measure of progress. Where the Vendors Are Placing Their Bets Nisum isn’t alone in reading the room this way. Several of the technology providers on the boardwalk this week are pitching some version of the same pivot, from proving AI works to proving it pays. The California-based global consulting firm, which says it has worked in retail and commerce for more than 25 years and has over 1,500 engineers and consultants, will be hosting two Breakthru Experiences at the festival, under the title From Pilot to P&L: An Unfiltered Guide for Retail Technology Leaders, presented by board member and Cartweel co-founder Sajid Mohamedy. According to the company, the sessions will examine why some retail AI pilots fail to reach production and what separates the initiatives that continue into the next budget cycle.Its retail work is organized around four areas, and two of the four, AI-powered margin growth and data and AI for retail performance, are named for outcomes rather than tools. Other vendors are running the same argument through…