Everyone at NWA Tech Summit was talking about agents. The tote bags still needed a home.

I am in Bentonville for ten weeks, and today I spent the day at the NWA Tech Summit.

The theme was the agentic workforce. Anupriya Sharma, VP of Tech Strategy, Operations and Technical Program Management at Walmart U.S., gave the opening keynote on human plus AI and redesigning how work gets done. Her framing was that we are living through one of the biggest platform shifts in the history of modern computing. Nobody in the room argued with her.

Two of the three morning breakouts were about retail workflows and the supply chain. The main stage session was on how agentic AI is rewiring the supply chain, with people from Sam's Club, J.B. Hunt, and New Road Capital Partners. The afternoon had a panel on the emerging companies building the agentic operating layer for retail. In most cities the AI conversation is about software. Here it is about software attached to trucks, stores, and pallets.

Agents do not move pallets

I run a company that routes returned and excess inventory to nonprofits, so I am not neutral about any of this. I spent the day listening to very smart people describe systems that reroute, reprice, and reforecast. All of that is real and most of it is overdue.

None of it changes what happens to the physical thing. Software can decide in a second that a pallet of product is no longer worth selling. Something still has to go get it, and somebody still has to decide where it goes. That decision is almost always made last, by whoever is standing closest to it, at the end of a long day.

The best thing that happened today happened when the vendor hall closed

When a vendor hall closes, leftover product has three normal endings. It goes home in a box that lives in someone's garage. It goes back into a supply closet. Or it goes in the trash behind the venue. Most of it is brand new. Most of it will never be used.

Today several vendors picked a fourth option. Okta had a stack of black cotton totes. Cyderes had Yeti tumblers still wrapped in tissue paper. Rather than pack it all out, they put it in a BoxDrop, and the product goes to nonprofits right here in Northwest Arkansas.

I cannot give you a clean number for how much conference swag gets manufactured, shipped across the country, handed out for one day, and then thrown away. Nobody publishes that number. That is part of the problem. What I can tell you is that a case of new tumblers is worth real money to a nonprofit trying to thank its volunteers, and it is worth nothing in a landfill.

BoxDrop is the piece of this we are rolling out for stores right now, and it is the same box that works in an office or a vendor hall. You buy a pre-labeled donation box with shipping and handling included in the price, you put it out where people are standing, and you fill it with leftover items, unsellable returns, and samples. When it is full you ship it. We match what is inside to vetted nonprofits and document the fair market value for your records. 

You can order one here: https://www.liquidonate.com/donation-boxes

We are not an event company and we are not trying to become one. We do not staff booths and we do not manage your load-out. We put a box on the table. That box is the whole difference between product that gets used and product that gets thrown away. A store aisle, an office kitchen, a conference vendor hall: same problem, same box. New and like new goods routed to their next best use. That’s LiquiDonate and what I’m here to share.

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