DICK’S Bets the Store on Agentic Commerce. The Stakes Are Higher Than a Better Chatbot.

In towns across America, the volunteer coach who knows which 12-year-old needs encouragement and which one needs a firm word is being asked to compete with an algorithm.

DICK'S Sporting Goods thinks that coach is now obsolete. The retailer, which operates more than 700 stores and has built its brand around the premise that sports change lives, launched Coach by DICK'S on Thursday — an agentic AI experience in its mobile app that promises to deliver the same sport-specific guidance, personalized to each athlete's ability and goals, without requiring a human on the other end. The product rolls out in June.

It is a significant bet for a company that built much of its retail identity around in-store expertise and community sports sponsorships. DICK'S has been the title sponsor of youth sports leagues through its sports matter initiative for years, framing itself as the institution that kept local athletics alive. The implicit argument in the Coach product is that institution no longer needs to be human.

The launch announcement reads like most retail AI press releases: personalized recommendations, Pro Tips, tailored guidance. But underneath the product description lies an infrastructure story the PR elides. DICK'S built Coach by DICK'S on Adobe Brand Concierge, a conversational AI platform that sits on top of Adobe Commerce. That choice of platform is the more consequential signal for the industry.

Adobe published a February 2026 blog post confirming what retailers have been reluctant to state plainly: AI agents are becoming a primary discovery channel, and the retailers who have not prepared for that shift are already losing ground. During the 2025 holiday season, generative AI tools drove a 693.4 percent increase in traffic to retail sites, according to Adobe Digital Insights data cited in an Adobe Commerce blog post. More consequentially, shoppers referred by AI convert 31 percent higher than average, generate 254 percent more revenue per visit, and spend 45 percent more time on-site once they arrive. These figures are not cherry-picked early-adopter metrics — Adobe's data covers the full holiday season across its retail client base.

"In this new model, discovery, decisioning, and action collapse into a single conversation," wrote Kartavya Jain, Adobe's head of commerce strategy, in a February blog post laying out the company's agentic commerce roadmap. "Brands face a dual imperative — optimize for AI agent discoverability while deepening direct customer relationships."

That dual imperative is where the pressure concentrates. Adobe is committing to two competing agentic commerce protocols: the Universal Commerce Protocol (UCP) and the Agentic Commerce Protocol (ACP). Both aim to make product data — pricing, inventory, specifications — machine-readable so that AI agents can compare, recommend, and purchase without routing a human through a website. UCP is backed partly by Google; ACP has its own coalition of retailers and platforms. The protocol question matters because whoever wins shapes which retailers get visibility when an AI agent is shopping on a customer's behalf.

DICK'S, ranked 30th among North American online retailers by revenue, is the first large-scale public deployment of this infrastructure. Jason Cherok, DICK'S vice president of product, design and analytics, described the goal to The Information in April as building "a seamless conversational experience" across the retailer's entire athlete ecosystem — online, in-store, mobile, and service channels — where the AI handles complex multi-step interactions autonomously rather than answering FAQ-style queries, per Dealroom.co.

"From stores to online, from shopping to performance services, AI capabilities — powered by our deep knowledge of athletes and sport — are becoming the pillar of our strategy," CTO Vlad Rak said in Adobe's announcement.

Whether that vision translates into a working product is an open question. Coach by DICK'S does not launch until June. There are no published conversion metrics, no disclosed adoption targets, and no independent benchmarks for how Adobe Brand Concierge performs at this scale outside of controlled pilots. The 31-percent conversion uplift Adobe cites applies to AI-referred traffic generally — not to agentic commerce experiences specifically. Those are different things.

The pressure, however, is not hypothetical. If AI agents become a primary shopping interface — if a customer's calendar triggers a purchasing agent to restock gym gear, or a family AI searches for a birthday gift across multiple retailers simultaneously — then the retailers without agent-readable product data will be invisible to that channel. They will not appear in comparisons. They will not be selectable. The shelf space in the LLM shopping interface goes to whoever built the infrastructure first.

CEO Lauren Hobart told analysts in February that DICK'S is "evaluating all aspects of artificial intelligence, including agentic," per Digital Commerce 360. That evaluation is now a product. The question the data does not yet answer is whether the product works, and whether DICK'S is early enough to matter or just early enough to be a reference case for Adobe's platform pitch.

What is clear is that the retailer has decided the cost of being wrong about agentic commerce is higher than the cost of building for it.