Dick’s Sporting Goods is preparing to launch an AI-powered “digital coach” built with Adobe, positioning it less as the usual help-desk deflection bot and more as the “front door” to the retailer’s CRM.
The idea: shoppers chat about what they’re buying, playing, training for, or trying to fix — a golf swing, for example — and the assistant recommends products or advice. The conversation then becomes customer data. Very neighborly, in the way a clipboard can be neighborly.
Under the hood, those interactions are meant to feed a chain of agentic AI systems that turn raw chat into targeted marketing. Dick’s is using Adobe’s CX Enterprise platform, which Ad Age says launched last week, to run agents across customer experience tasks: building a knowledge graph on individuals, choosing relevant content, and deciding where to deploy it.
In Dick’s case, the coach sends data into a repository tied to roughly 30 million consumers. Other agents can then parse it and route personalized content into email, if the customer has one on file, or back into the chatbot when the customer returns.
The broader enterprise stack is moving in the same direction. Ad Age notes that Adobe, Salesforce, and HubSpot are all offering ways for brands to connect chatbots to CRMs, while consumer behavior is being softened up by tools like ChatGPT. PartnerCentric research cited by Ad Age found that 64% of consumers now consider using AI tools to help them shop — a useful tailwind for brands hoping people will volunteer preferences in a chat box.
Still, Dick’s hasn’t officially launched the coach yet, and the company could not provide examples of actual targeted content the assistant has helped create. So for now, the concrete output is the plan: a “relationship-building” bot that is also a data intake form with better manners.
Read more at AdAge.