Academy Sports and Outdoors’ omnichannel definition includes AI platforms

For Academy Sports and Outdoors, the term omnichannel no longer refers solely to the integration between a retailer’s website, mobile app and physical store; it now includes artificial intelligence (AI) platforms, such as the large-language models (LLMs) OpenAI’s ChatGPT and Google’s Gemini.

And like integrating any other channel into the retailer’s operations, that means connecting the data. Sumit Anand, chief information officer at Academy Sports and Outdoors, told Digital Commerce 360 that it starts with product catalogs.

It “all boils down to how we mature our product feeds for one of them [the channels], and that can be scaled across the others,” Anand said. “So from an ecosystem perspective, the world doesn’t change much. From a scale perspective, it’s just a matter of getting it right and continuing to mature it because the refinement in this is going to be key.”

That scaling is critical for retailers that have thousands, or hundreds of thousands, of stock-keeping units (SKUs). Anand said Academy Sports enhances its product attributes — and by extension, its feeds — in “waves, by department. There’s a whole method that we follow. Otherwise, this could be a never-ending thing.”

Academy Sports and Outdoors is currently 142nd in the Top 2000 Database. The database ranks North America’s largest online retailers by their annual ecommerce sales and more. News Vessi targets 'clean' product data to maximize AEO opportunities Abbas Haleem | Apr 29, 2026