Sam’s Club’s Julie Barber On Agentic AI, Surprise & Delight, and the Future of Merchandising | NRF 2026

Welcome back, everyone.

This is Omnitalk Retail.

I'm Anne Mazinga.

And I'm Chris Walton.

And we are here from the Vuzion booth at number 4921.

Here at NRF, the big show.

We have another Sam's Club person here next to me who's going to share more about what you just heard from Todd Garner, their chief product officer.

Next to me is Julie Barber, the chief merchandising officer at Sam's Club.

Julie, welcome to the show.

Thank you.

Excited to be here.

Yeah.

First time for you.

Yes.

And we love talking to merchants as well, because you are the role right now that everybody is saying you can't replace.

Can you replace merchants with AI?

No, you cannot.

You still need the merchants.

So we're excited to have you here today.

Yes.

I'm sure many people are trying, though, you know, given the way this industry works.

All right, so with that said, chief merchant, what's your background and describe.

Describe everything that your role that's under your purview.

Because many different retailers can, you know, create the merchandising role, the chief merchandising role, very differently or operate it very differently.

So I'd love to hear about that.

Yeah, true.

So actually, I've been with Walmart Inc. For 21 years, first few years in transformation type of roles, and moved into merchandising about five years in.

And I've spent 15 years in merchandising.

Okay.

I've done everything in merchandising.

I've worked in fresh, dry grocery snacks and bev.

I worked in otc, health and wellness consumables.

I worked in general merchandise, home, hard lines, etc.

And now at Sam's Club, I have the gamut.

So it's been fun, a good career.

Yeah.

So many pivots, learned so many things.

And under my purview now is quite a bit of things.

So all of these sort of categories that I just talked about in terms of, you know.

And then also at Sam's Club, we have a big services business.

So I also have services and credit cards.

So travel, pharmacy, all those things.

Yeah, Interesting.

It's fine.

Do you have the digital side of that as well?

Digital side as well?

Yeah.

Interesting.

All right, well, Julie, I'm curious what you, as you look back at 2025, especially from the merchandising sector of the business, was there anything that surprised you about how members were shopping this past year that might influence kind of what your team's strategy is ahead now in 2026?

Yeah, absolutely.

I Think what we saw is our members were very intentional.

They were thoughtful about what they wanted.

They were leaning in for value.

They.

They were headed for a lot of healthy choices, a lot of things with protein.

You're seeing that too.

Yeah, definitely.

So I think that health and wellness trend.

But then the other thing is they come in intentionally for some of these trips, and then they love the surprise and delight.

So we had a lot of fun with Surprise and Delight where there was brands, new items that the member wasn't expecting.

Also club of the community.

They like to feel their community when they come in to the club or they're on the website.

So those sort of things themes were coming out last year, and they're still trending right into this year.

Very intentional in their shopping.

Wow.

Julie, I'm curious, too.

We had Todd Garner on earlier.

As Anne alluded to at the outset, you're head of product Scan and Go.

We talked about Scan and Go a lot about that with him.

Curious.

Has that.

Does the 40% usage?

I think Todd said that's right.

Has that usage rate impacted how you think about merchandising and the product selection you put into a Sam's Club?

Absolutely.

One of the things that I think is fantastic is with Scan and Go, we learn a lot more about our member and how they want to buy things, when they want to buy things, the track that they take.

So it allows us to think more about what are the right items, what are the adjacencies, the assortment that we carry.

So Scan and Go is a big, big win for our merchants.

So it's kind of like it gets to that connected store idea, too, a little bit, because you're able to see the path, what people are doing when they're in the store and what's working and what's not.

Yeah, absolutely.

I think the other thing that I would say is a lot of the work that Todd and team are doing are allowing us to see better accuracy around our inventory.

Where is our inventory placed?

Is it on the floor?

Is it in the steel?

So, yeah, between Scan and Go and our scrubbers, it really helps the lives of the merchants.

The scrubbers, too?

How so?

Oh, yeah, those scrubbers, you know, they're actually going up and down the aisles.

They're telling us exactly where our inventory is.

So if a club says, I can't find it.

Oh, I can find it through the data of the scrubbers.

So it's really great to see it.

Or if we.

We might need to go back and say, hey, there's a Great new item for new year.

New you that we're not seeing enough sales on the scrubbers.

Tell us it's in the steal.

Hey, club managers, can you help us get it down?

Yeah, it's really fantastic.

Simple.

Makes sense.

Makes sense.

Fundamentals.

Absolutely.

Well, Julie, one of the things you mentioned earlier was kind of changing requirements from consumers.

Consumers, especially in members, especially looking for things with more protein.

Fresh, obviously, I assume a big component of that too.

With fresh being such a challenging part of the business.

Low margins, you have spoilage and things to think about.

How do you think about the assortment that your merchants are putting forward in Fresh to kind of like give you that treasure hunt of like, ooh, the, the, you know, the milk that has protein added to it versus, you know, just keeping those staples in shop or in clubs so that people can find those things time and time again?

Yeah.

So I think we sort of have looked at it and said, first, we're going to lean in with healthy food.

So you might have heard, but we have an amazing brand called Member's Mark.

We just, as of January 1st, we completed our commitment of removing 40 artificial colors and ingredients.

So all the things that you buy from Members, Mark, are healthy.

So keeping that at the base, leaning into fresh fruits and veggies, and then a lot of amazing choice for the member as it becomes ease.

So we have a home meal solution business.

If you haven't tried it, you should come in where you can get amazing meals, healthy meals through Member's Mark that are fresh.

And that is how we kind of can lean in with a treasure hunt.

So you might want to have.

We might have tacos during this season.

We have all kinds of different options also in our frozen business.

So for us, I think Fresh, it can be a hard business, but it's actually been a phenomenal business for us at Sam's Club.

Growing, growing, growing, growing, continuing to grow a lot.

And that's also, I think that the thing I would tell you about that is we have the absolute best merchants at Sam's Club in Fresh.

Particularly, we have a great number of merchants who've been there, I would say, in the role for a long time.

They know what they're doing.

They're experts.

They're out in the fields.

We have sommeliers.

We have people who have worked in fruit and veg all the time.

So there's that balance of taking what could be a really hard category and.

And building in.

We have so much expertise.

It helps us not have to worry so much about the basics and Then we can get these other exciting things going and try new things.

Surprise and delight.

If there's a little blip, we can.

We're okay.

Yeah, it's fun.

It's art and science.

I'm curious, how do you, as a merchant, as a merchant leader, continue to impress upon your team the idea of surprise and delight?

Like, is there anything you do?

Like just keep that top of mind.

Absolutely.

Well, when we're in meetings, we talk about things that are surprising.

Delight.

We also.

One thing is wonderful is our comms team.

We get a lot of talk out there in the world about our surprise and delight.

So people see articles about it, we talk about them in meetings.

If you want a hot item at a great value, it's talked about.

So the surprise and delight is sort of an element all the time.

It is a core pillar of my strategy.

So we never stop talking about it.

Yeah.

In fact, you just had a big pharmacy announcement.

Yes, we did.

A surprise and delight too.

Tell us about that.

Yeah.

Pharmacy announcement.

We are now offering some GLP1s in a pill form, which is fantastic and we're excited about that.

We also have pharmacy delivery, so that is fantastic for us.

Our pharmacy business is doing well and we have some great leaders there.

That's awesome.

All right, so we're at NRF 2026.

It's a tech conference.

AI talk of the town.

Agentic, the word of the show.

How are you thinking about the application of AI from a merchant leader perspective?

Like, are you using it for pricing, forecasting?

But I want you to talk about it through all the angles that you can.

So like from the headquarters also to the consumer side of things.

Because you touch everything.

Yeah.

Let me start kind of at the beginning and talk about assortment.

Okay.

So we're using a genetic for assortment a lot.

Oh, wow.

Yeah.

Oh, yeah.

So we do it internally and externally.

So we have a lot of data internal.

We can look at our current makeup of items and say what is working well in clubs, what is not, and we can pull in sister clubs.

So for example, a club in Florida is doing really well on a bunch of things, but we want to see what's not working as well.

And we find a few items.

Maybe we've sending them too many warm weather or cold weather items.

We look and say, okay, we need to pull those out, but what do we need to replace it with?

We can look at our current assortment and see what sister stores have and immediately pull it in.

Agentic has built this for us.

It used to take weeks and weeks with spreadsheets.

And now it's like, bam, 20 minutes later, you know how to make changes into your clubs.

Then there's a broader sense of assortment that we can actually pull in third party data to understand what's in the marketplace that we don't have.

So I think from an assortment standpoint, really what Igentiq is doing for us is speeding it up.

There's another part of that as I think about getting to the consumer.

Once you decide on the assortment, you're then deciding, how much of it am I gonna buy?

Where am I gonna place it?

Is it in a club?

Is it in a fulfillment center?

How do they want it?

And as we take the agentic information and input that it's giving us more precision on where to place it, how much to buy, and.

And that means something to the member.

A couple of things I would say.

One is it means better in stock.

It means it can get to them faster through a fulfillment center because we ordered the right amount and put it in the right place.

And ultimately, what I believe is we're going to get to a point where all of these efficiencies with agentic are going to reduce cost, reduce costs that could be invested back into the business and back into the product and therefore giving lower prices to our members.

I'm excited about all the things we're doing well.

Yeah, you just sum that up very well.

Yeah, yeah, it's exciting.

Right?

Let's close on a question that we asked Todd too.

But what are you going to be most excited about as you look back at 2026, that you and your team, your merchants, the best merchants out there, accomplished in this year.

I think if we continue to focus on making sure we have the best curated assortment, whether that's members Mark made without surprise and delight items club of the community.

If we focus on that next year when we're here, you're going to see some great sales again.

All right, well, thank you so much for joining us.

It's great to meet you too.

Yeah, this has been fantastic.

Thanks for having me.

Thanks for taking the time out.

I know you all are busy and you have busy schedules and so it means a lot to us whenever we get a chance to talk to you.

All right, well, that concludes our interview with Julie.

Thank you.

Thank you to Vuzion for sponsoring our coverage here at NRF 2026.

They're at booth 4921.

Stop by, see them, stop by, say hi to Ann and myself.

And Ann, until next time.

Be careful out there.