Why Wayfair isn’t ‘dogmatic’ about its AI usage

Shoptalk // March 26, 2026 Why Wayfair isn’t ‘dogmatic’ about its AI usage By Anna Hensel Wayfair likes to say that it started as a tech company. Founded in 2002, Wayfair got its start claiming hundreds of different URLs, like bedroomfurniture. com, to capture as much search traffic as possible in the early days of online shopping.

Since then, the company has grown up a lot and shifted into new areas of commerce – it’s now opening stores, for example. But Wayfair tries to keep that experimental, first-mover mindset as the industry has shifted.

That was the company’s message at the annual Shoptalk Spring conference, during a mainstage session with the company’s co-founder and CEO, Niraj Shah, and during a separate interview that its chief marketing officer, Paul Toms, gave with Modern Retail. Toms says Wayfair likes to be on “the leading edge” when it comes to AI.

Not every use case is a hit, Toms acknowledged — he said Wayfair has gotten messages or comments from customers on social media decrying the use of “AI slop.” But he said that that’s OK. “I think the important thing is to make sure you’re kind of keeping the pulse on the total audience,” Toms said. “You’re understanding the signal from the noise.

You’re being respectful of those opinions and how you receive them and react to them.” Wayfair, of course, is now using AI for creative generation, and also for QA processes, to name just a few examples. But the company has also sought to roll out new tools that use AI to aid in the shopping and discovery process.

Last year, for example, Wayfair rolled out a new AI-powered discover tab that uses AI-generated creative to help customers visualize what different items may look like paired together or incorporated into a certain theme.

In an interview with Modern Retail, Toms spoke with Modern Retail about his philosophical approach to AI usage, the feedback the company has received from shoppers about its AI tools and more. This interview has been edited for clarity and length. I wanted to ask you about AI because it’s a hot topic.

Wayfair is an interesting company because you also have a lot of AI shopping tools yourself. Can you give me an overview of where Wayfair is at and what different AI tools shoppers may encounter in the process of shopping through Wayfair?

“AI feels a lot like what the company felt like 20 years ago when we were just starting: technologies that allow you to do things that you could never imagine doing before We launched a Discover tab a little less than a year ago, I think – the concept there being: I can now generate thousands or hundreds of thousands of inspirational images that allow you to find exactly the look you’re looking for, and then immediately shop those products and have them delivered to you.

And that might sound simple, but three years ago, to do that at that scale, you’d have to be running a dozen photo studios full-time. In our category, where the value is for the customer is in that inspiration step. The customer knows what they want visually, but they don’t have a way to describe it, right?

There’s a navigation step that hasn’t been easy for anyone shopping in these categories for, you know, decades, and now we feel like we’re on the path to really unlocking that, and unlocking in a way that’s very specific to Wayfair.” Are you actively talking about [the Discover Tab] in your marketing?

“Certainly we do have some amount of budget we use for that, [but] it’s actually more just about the function of it. It’s about coming to Wayfair for an easy shopping experience, and it’s less about launching a new product.” What is your sense of how the Wayfair customer feels about AI? I recognize you probably have a lot of different cohorts.

But do you feel like your customers like using AI? Are they using it in their shopping process? “It’s very, very dependent in every case.

At the same time that I’m sitting here telling you how effective it is and how folks really get a lot out of the Discover tab, we’ve launched plenty of other things, including on the Discover tab, that customers have absolutely rejected, right?

I would also say that’s a moving target; how folks receive this today will be different from how they receive it tomorrow — both because of attitudes about AI, but also because of how the technology evolves. It gets better. So to us, it comes back to: How do I make sure I’m grounding myself in the customer’s shoes?

How am I building things that make their lives easier? How am I doing that in a way that they’re willing to receive and use and not reject? And if you’re close with your customer, you should be able to stay grounded there, and honestly, a lot of that becomes pretty self-evident along the way.”

When you said, “We’ve tried things on the Discover tab that custom