Category Management in the Age of AI: What 40 Years of "Growing the Pie" Still Teaches Us

Category management has always had a deceptively simple premise: grow the whole pie, not just your slice of it. On the latest episode of Conversations on Retail by Storesight, hosts Marc Yount and Henry Ho sat down with Abby Horsager, a former P&G category management and growth analyst who recently joined the Storesight team, to unpack what that premise actually looks like in 2026, and what's changed (and hasn't) since the function was invented.

Where it started

Henry, who helped build the category management discipline at P&G in the mid-to-late 1980s alongside pioneers like Dr. Brian Harris, put it plainly: the goal was never brand-first. "We want to grow the pie for everyone," he explained. "P&G being such a big share of the pie, it's going to benefit everyone the most by growing the whole pie." That framing, partnership over turf war, is still the clearest one-line definition of the function four decades later.

Trust is the whole game

If there was one word that came up more than any other in this conversation, it was trust. Abby was direct about it: the best buyers can spot bad data instantly, and what you bring to the table can't just be numbers: it has to be an insight that leads to action. "Every time you come to a meeting with them, bring them something," she said. "Not just be asking."

Henry has a saying for this: always bring a gift to your buyer, not stuff, an insight. The more consistently you show up with something genuinely useful about the category, the more credibility compounds over time. That credibility is also what separates a category manager from a category captain (or advisor), the vendor entrusted with drawing the planogram itself. Abby's own path to informal captaincy at retailers without an official program came down to exactly this: she'd built enough trust through insights that when she asked to help with mods, the answer was yes.

Data isn't the bottleneck anymore, synthesis is

Abby was candid that even before AI, the job was never really about having data; it was about synthesizing disparate sources (dollar sales, velocity, switching behavior, shopper data) into something a buyer could act on. What's changed is the toolset. "I think using AI in a way to help synthesize is what is so critical," she said, with a specific twist: instead of asking AI narrow questions you already know the answer to, use it to surface the questions you haven't thought to ask yet.

That distinction matters for how the team thinks about talent, too. Abby doesn't believe AI eliminates the analyst, but it does change what junior analysts should spend their time on. Repetitive data-pulling is fair game for automation. What can't be automated is teaching people to keep peeling back layers until they reach a question that actually leads to a decision. "The first question you ask oftentimes isn't going to be the right one," she noted. As Henry added, thinking critically, like the shopper, like the buyer, matters more than ever precisely because the tools are getting faster.

The plan isn't the job, execution is

Perhaps the most practical thread in the episode was about what happens after the planogram gets approved. Abby shared a story from a category manager who'd built an entire secondary set of mods for a retailer moving items behind glass, only to check execution in-store and find the fixtures didn't match what was actually on the shelf at all. Without visibility into execution, she'd have drawn the wrong conclusions about whether the strategy was even working.

That's really the crux of it: category management carries two responsibilities: enabling the selling story to the retailer, and monitoring whether the plan that was agreed to actually got executed in the field. Months of shopper insights and planogram work can evaporate the moment a plan hits the store floor without a way to verify it stuck.

The throughline

Across the conversation, a few themes kept resurfacing: know your business well enough to sense when a number looks off, build trust through insights instead of asks, use AI to expand the questions you're asking rather than just to speed up the answers you already have, and never assume a plan executed just because it was approved. As Henry put it, the category managers who become great storytellers, who can translate shopper and market shifts into a compelling, credible narrative, are the ones who'll shape where this function goes next.

This piece is based on the latest episode of Conversations on Retail by Storesight, featuring Marc Yount, Henry Ho, and guest Abby Horsager.