On this page · 10 sections
Summary. NRF 2027: Retail's Big Show runs from 10 to 12 January 2027 at the Jacob K. Javits Convention Center in New York, with the opening party on 9 January. NRF says the show draws more than 41,000 retail professionals and that the Expo hosts more than 1,000 solution providers. The theme is Fast Forward, but the agenda reads like an agentic commerce conference: on 12 November, 19 sessions carry NRF's Agentic AI tag and 28 mention agentic in their title or description. The opening keynote pairs NRF Chairman Bob Eddy with Amazon's Doug Herrington on AI and the Alexa shopping agent. Walmart, Stripe with Best Buy, Levi's with Etsy, American Express, Adyen, PayPal, Algolia, and NVIDIA with Kroger have sessions on agents, checkout or product data, while Shopify's Harley Finkelstein has a Monday keynote with details to come. Retailers that are NRF members pay $1,200 for an All-Access Pass until 19 November 2026, then $1,300 to 7 January and $1,400 after; the Retail Expo Pass is free until 30 December, and AI Monday is sold out. Our advice: book this week, split your team across the agentic sessions, and bring a catalogue and checkout readiness scorecard.
About this article. For CTOs and ecommerce, payments and marketing leads at US retailers planning a team trip to NRF 2027. We checked dates, prices, sessions and speakers against NRF's event pages and agenda data (last updated by NRF on 12 November 2026), and protocol facts against Google's announcements, on 12 November 2026. NRF changes sessions often, so re-check before you book. This is general information, not financial advice; no vendor or event organiser paid for inclusion. Researched with AI assistance and reviewed by our editorial team.
NRF 2027 at a glance
The details below come from NRF's registration, AI Stage and agenda pages. All times are New York time.
| Item | Detail | Status on 12 November 2026 |
|---|---|---|
| Dates | Sunday 10 to Tuesday 12 January 2027 | Confirmed by NRF |
| Venue | Jacob K. Javits Convention Center, New York City | Confirmed |
| Opening party | Saturday 9 January, 5:30 to 7:00 p.m., Marriott Marquis, Times Square | On the agenda |
| Expo hours | 9:00 a.m. to 5:00 p.m. Sunday and Monday, to 4:00 p.m. Tuesday | Published |
| AI Stage | Expo Level 1, open to free Expo Pass holders; branded AI Stage by Klaviyo | Published |
| Ask the Speaker | Four 20-minute slots between 1:00 and 2:30 p.m. daily, Javits North Level 5 | All-Access only |
| Commerce Media Saturday | 9 January, 8:30 a.m. to 6:30 p.m., Lavan New York (offsite), $195 | Published |
| Supply Chain Sunday | 10 January, 3:30 to 7:30 p.m., Lavan New York, free for retailers and brands | Separate registration |
| AI Monday (AiR Summit and Soirée) | 11 January, summit 4:30 to 7:30 p.m., free for retailers and brands | Sold out, waitlist open |
NRF runs the three side events with RETHINK Retail. Registering for Supply Chain Sunday or AI Monday does not guarantee entry: people are admitted in order of arrival until the Lavan venue is full, so treat the AI Monday waitlist as a maybe.
One trap: the NRF home page speaker carousel is still labelled NRF 2026 Speakers. Use the agenda for 2027 names. CES 2027 runs from 6 to 9 January in Las Vegas, so the two shows run back to back; our CES 2027 briefing covers that week.
The agentic commerce sessions on the agenda
These are the main AI and agentic commerce sessions in NRF's agenda data on 12 November, with the speakers NRF names. Keynotes and Featured sessions need an All-Access Pass; AI Stage and Exhibitor Big Ideas sessions are open to Expo Pass holders too. Exhibitor Big Ideas sessions are vendor-produced.
| Day and time | Session | Named speakers | Type |
|---|---|---|---|
| Sun 8:30 a.m. | NRF chairman's welcome: Moving fast forward together | Bob Eddy, BJ's Wholesale Club; Doug Herrington, Amazon | Keynote |
| Sun 9:15 a.m. | Your intelligence. Your advantage: Redefining what's possible in retail | Judson Althoff, Microsoft | Keynote |
| Sun 9:45 a.m. | Beyond the headlines: What consumers and commerce are telling us about retail's future | Anna Marrs, American Express | Keynote |
| Sun 11:30 a.m. | How Levi's & Etsy Are Rewiring Their Businesses for Today's Agentic AI Era | Jason Gowans, Levi Strauss & Co.; Rafe Colburn, Etsy; Poonam Goyal, Bloomberg Intelligence | Featured |
| Sun 12:15 p.m. | Inside Walmart's AI Pivot: What Actually Happens When Commerce Becomes Agentic | Hari Vasudev, Sean Scott and Tracy Poulliot, Walmart | Featured |
| Sun 12:15 p.m. | The agentic retail enterprise: From unified data foundation to autonomous operations | Not yet listed (Snowflake session) | AI Stage |
| Sun 1:00 p.m. | Who's in Control? Building trust into the agentic commerce stack | Mike Edmonds, PayPal | Exhibitor Big Ideas |
| Sun 1:45 p.m. | Building scalable, secure, and cost-efficient agentic AI solutions with frontier & open-source models | Azita Martin, NVIDIA; Kristin Foster, Kroger; Oscar Mullin, Mercado Libre; Natalie Mao, Rakuten | Featured |
| Sun 1:45 p.m. | The Agentic Commerce Playbook: Lessons from Early Movers | Maia Josebachvili, Stripe; James Lane, Best Buy | Featured |
| Sun 3:15 p.m. | Hype, reality, or ROI? The great payment & checkout debate | Nadya Maffei, Adyen | Exhibitor Big Ideas |
| Mon 10:15 a.m. | Your customer asked AI first | Not yet listed (IBM session) | Exhibitor Big Ideas |
| Mon 10:45 a.m. | No second chances (product data for AI shopping agents) | Stephen Lynch, Algolia; Sareena Khera, Vuori; Craig Shields, JTV | Featured |
| Mon 1:00 p.m. | The rise of agentic shopping: From Amazon to AWS | Amanda Doerr, Amazon; Petra Schindler-Carter, AWS | Featured |
| Mon 2:15 p.m. | Built to win: How infrastructure separates AI-ready retailers from the rest | Amelia Van Camp, Mirakl; Joe Cano, Lowe's | AI Stage |
| Mon 3:15 p.m. | NRF Curated Keynote Session | Harley Finkelstein, Shopify (details to come) | Keynote |
| Mon 3:30 p.m. | Agentic commerce: Lessons from year one | Karan Katyal, Adyen; Nathan Enderle, SCHEELS; Kate Thomas, VF Corporation | AI Stage |
| Tue 9:15 a.m. | Fast-forward agentic commerce: When AI agents become the buyer | Kate Walton, J.P. Morgan Payments; Anne-Claire Baschet, Mirakl | Exhibitor Big Ideas |
Several slots clash. Stripe and NVIDIA both start at 1:45 p.m. on Sunday, Walmart's Sunday keynote with PwC overlaps Adyen's checkout debate at 3:15 p.m., and the Shopify keynote overlaps Adyen's AI Stage session on Monday. One person cannot cover the list.
What the session descriptions tell buyers
Walmart says the deals are done; execution is the story. Its description says the partnerships, protocols and pilots are already announced, and the session is about how AI changes the mechanics of retail. One speaker is Walmart's SVP of AI Shopping Product. Walmart also co-developed Google's Universal Commerce Protocol (UCP), so ask how agent orders flow through its systems.
Stripe says agentic commerce is already live. The Stripe and Best Buy description says it has moved into production and that Stripe has worked with retailers on it for more than a year, from AI product discovery to checkout inside agents. That is a vendor claim, but it points to what payment teams must settle: tokenised credentials, merchant of record, and disputes on agent-placed orders.
American Express calls it the biggest shift since ecommerce. The Anna Marrs fireside frames agentic commerce as the largest change to shopping since online retail began. Listen for anything on agent identity and fraud liability.
Product data is the new shop window. The Algolia, Vuori and JTV panel argues that agents read data rather than browse, and that one stale price, wrong stock count or invented attribute can drop a retailer from consideration. It promises a working definition of agent-ready: verified product data, real-time price and availability, a taxonomy machines can reason over, and governed endpoints.
Trust and fragmentation worry the payment side. PayPal's session lists identity verification, spending rules, real-time approval and interoperability as the trust layer agents need; its co-panellists are not yet named. Adyen's year-one session says each AI platform speaks a different language and pitches one integration for all of them, with SCHEELS and VF Corporation describing their route to live orders. Adyen's Sunday debate weighs agentic purchasing against SoftPOS, biometrics and express checkout fees.
Model cost is on the main programme. The NVIDIA session covers hybrid platforms that mix frontier and open-source models, claiming much lower inference cost and more control over model IP. Treat that as a vendor claim until you see numbers on your own workloads. Amazon also appears twice: Amazon Shopping and AWS will explain how Amazon's agentic shopping work led to an Agentic Shopping Assistant on AWS.
What is not published yet
Mark these as expected, not confirmed:
- Monday's opening keynote (8:30 a.m.) has no speaker and details to come.
- Shopify's keynote (3:15 p.m. Monday) names Harley Finkelstein but has no topic.
- PepsiCo Foods U.S. with Deloitte (2:45 p.m. Monday) and Mitch Joel's closing keynote (2:30 p.m. Tuesday) also have details to come.
- Some vendor sessions, including Snowflake's and IBM's, list no speakers. The Session Topics page, first published on 8 October, still asks visitors to check back for the line-up.
- Ask the Speaker is now on the agenda, though the pass types page still says its schedule is coming soon.
- Product launches. NRF does not publish vendor launch plans, and nothing on the agenda confirms one.
Six themes and the questions to bring
| Theme | Sessions that cover it | Questions for vendors | Your homework before New York |
|---|---|---|---|
| Agent-readable product data | Algolia panel; Mirakl and Lowe's; IBM session | How do you expose verified price and stock to agents? What is the update latency? | Measure feed errors, missing attributes and cross-channel price mismatches |
| Agentic checkout and payments | Stripe and Best Buy; both Adyen sessions; J.P. Morgan Payments and Mirakl | Which agent checkout protocols do you support today? Who carries chargeback liability on agent orders? | Map your payment provider, tokenisation and merchant-of-record set-up |
| Trust and control | PayPal session; Amazon fireside on the Alexa shopping agent | How do you tell a legitimate shopping agent from a scraper? Can we rate-limit by agent? | Review bot rules so you do not block agents you want |
| Platform cost and ownership | NVIDIA, Kroger, Mercado Libre and Rakuten; Microsoft keynote | Cost per 1,000 assisted conversations? Can we run open-weight models in our cloud? | Baseline current LLM and search spend per order |
| Store operations | HP with Nebraska Furniture Mart; ServiceNow with Ulta Beauty; Kroger, NVIDIA and Dell | What changed in store KPIs at reference customers, and over what period? | List the three store processes you would automate first |
| Commerce media and discovery | Commerce Media Saturday; Klaviyo on AI marketing; e.l.f. Beauty and Hightouch | How do you attribute sales that start in an AI assistant? | Pull AI-referred traffic and conversion from the holidays |
The table draws on NRF's agenda. On protocols, Google launched UCP on 11 January 2026 with Shopify, Etsy, Wayfair, Target and Walmart as co-developers and Adyen, American Express, Best Buy and Stripe among its endorsers. On 15 October 2026 it began rolling out Universal Cart in the US across Search and the Gemini app; Google says the cart's checkout is powered by UCP and names merchants such as Target, Ulta Beauty, Walmart, Wayfair and many Shopify stores. Many of those names are on the NRF stage, so ask about real volumes. Our UCP checkout readiness guide covers the requirements, and our ACP vs UCP comparison shows how one checkout core can serve both protocols. Payments teams also planning terminal changes should read our Mastercard magstripe removal guide before meeting POS vendors.
Pass prices and a worked budget
NRF publishes US dollar prices per person. All rates below are from the registration page on 12 November 2026.
| Pass | By 19 November 2026 | 20 November to 7 January | From 8 January 2027 |
|---|---|---|---|
| All-Access, retail NRF member | $1,200 | $1,300 | $1,400 |
| All-Access, retail non-member | $2,200 | $2,300 | $2,400 |
| All-Access, non-retail member (max 5 per company) | $2,600 | $2,600 | $2,600 |
| All-Access, non-retail non-member (max 2 per company) | $3,800 | $3,800 | $3,800 |
| Retail Team, member (5 to 9 passes bought together) | $900 | $900 | $900 |
| Retail Super Team, member (10 or more) | $750 | $750 | $750 |
| Retail Team and Super Team, non-member | $1,500 and $1,250 | $1,500 and $1,250 | $1,500 and $1,250 |
| Retail Expo Pass | Free until 30 December 2026 | $100 from 31 December | $100 |
| Non-retail Expo Pass, member and non-member | $2,000 and $3,200 until 30 December | $2,100 and $3,500 from 31 December | $2,100 and $3,500 |
Add-ons: Expo Tours $150 and Retail Store Tours $180 per tour (both retailer only), Commerce Media Saturday $195, and audio translation $95 in advance or $125 on site. All-Access holders get 50% off Expo Tours. Travel is extra. Confirm one detail with NRF: its team pass description omits the Ask the Speaker sessions and pre-event webinar listed for the individual pass.
Worked example: a US specialty retailer that is an NRF member. The CTO, VP of ecommerce, head of payments, director of performance marketing and a store operations lead go All-Access, with three analysts on free Expo passes.
- Five individual advance passes: 5 × $1,200 = $6,000.
- One Retail Team order for the same five: 5 × $900 = $4,500, saving $1,500. All five must be bought together.
- Three analysts on Retail Expo Passes by 30 December: $0. Later: 3 × $100 = $300.
- Two Expo Tours: 2 × $150 = $300, or 2 × $75 = $150 with the All-Access discount.
- Commerce Media Saturday for the marketing director: $195.
- Total before travel: $4,500 + $0 + $150 + $195 = $4,845.
As non-members, the same five would pay 5 × $1,500 = $7,500 on the team rate, or 5 × $2,200 = $11,000 individually by 19 November. Membership saves $3,000 on team-rate passes alone, so price it before you book.
| Choose | If |
|---|---|
| All-Access, team rate | You send 5 or more decision-makers who need the keynotes and Featured sessions |
| Retail Expo Pass only | You are scouting vendors; AI Stage and Exhibitor Big Ideas are included |
| All-Access for one lead plus Expo passes | One person covers Walmart, Stripe and Levi's with Etsy; the rest take vendor meetings |
| Skip the trip | You only need content; NRF will post AI-generated keynote and Featured session summaries during the event |
The summaries detail is from NRF's session summaries page.
A three-day plan for a retail tech buying team
Saturday 9 January. Marketing leads attend Commerce Media Saturday. Everyone else collects badges and finalises the meeting grid before the opening party.
Sunday 10 January. The agentic commerce day. The CTO and ecommerce lead take the morning keynotes, then Levi's and Etsy at 11:30 a.m. and Walmart at 12:15 p.m. The payments lead covers PayPal at 1:00 p.m., Stripe at 1:45 p.m. and Adyen's debate at 3:15 p.m. Someone else takes the NVIDIA session if you are weighing open-weight models.
Monday 11 January. Product data owners take the IBM session at 10:15 a.m., the Algolia panel at 10:45 a.m. and Mirakl with Lowe's at 2:15 p.m. Ecommerce leads take Amazon and AWS at 1:00 p.m. and Shopify at 3:15 p.m., while payments takes Adyen at 3:30 p.m. Anyone cleared from the AI Monday waitlist heads to Lavan for 4:30 p.m.
Tuesday 12 January. Keynotes turn to brand leadership (J.Crew Group, Inditex, Marc Lore of Wonder). Payments and catalogue leads can catch J.P. Morgan Payments and Mirakl at 9:15 a.m. Use the rest of the day for follow-up meetings before the Expo closes at 4:00 p.m., then debrief while notes are fresh.
Pre-show checklist
- Register by 19 November 2026 for advance rates, and price the team rate for 5 or more people.
- Register extra staff on the free Retail Expo Pass by 30 December 2026.
- Join the AI Monday waitlist during registration if it matters to you.
- Audit your product feed: missing attributes, stale prices, inventory sync delay, returns data.
- Pull holiday data on AI-referred sessions and conversion so vendor ROI claims meet your baseline.
- Document your checkout stack: payment provider, tokenisation, fraud tools, merchant of record, chargebacks.
- Write a vendor scorecard covering protocol support, data ownership, latency, pricing basis and references.
- Book Expo meetings and leave gaps for the sessions above.
- Agree what data you will share in demos and under what NDA.
- Set a February decision date so the trip ends in a shortlist, not a pile of scanned badges.
How eCorpIT can help
eCorpIT is a Gurugram-based technology organisation, founded in 2021, assessed at CMMI Level 5 and MSME certified, with senior-led engineering teams working across AWS, Microsoft and Google platforms. We help US retailers and D2C brands turn a post-NRF shortlist into shipped work, from product feed clean-up to agent-ready checkout integrations, through our application development services. Talk to us at /contact-us/.
Last updated: 12 November 2026.
