Ecommerce Trends: How Best Buy is using AI

Best Buy is pushing artificial intelligence (AI) into areas of its operations in 2026, and its leadership team has described wider ambitions for how Best Buy will use AI to achieve near-term objectives.

In March, while speaking at the UBS Global Consumer and Retail Conference, Best Buy CEO Corie Barry called AI “a huge enabler of growth,” as well as for “good employee experiences.” At the time, she was addressing AI tools as internal resources for solving team members’ own problems.

However, she also outlined how certain use cases will extend to customers as well. Shoppers-facing AI deployments have since followed, notably with Best Buy opting to leverage OpenAI’s ChatGPT. Best Buy ranks No. 8 in the Top 1000 Database. The market research tool tracks North America’s largest online retailers by their annual ecommerce sales.

Best Buy is also No. 200 in Digital Commerce 360’s AI Rankings. That set of rankings is available in the Top 1000 Pro with AI Database. How Best Buy is using AI internally “I had an employee who — literally over the weekend — rewrote and created an agent for all of our employee tools,” Barry said in March.

Barry described this rewritten internal AI agent as responding to text-based input and said that the new version “now scrapes” information for employees to provide improved responses. “Now our employees can ask very normal human questions like ‘I’m new here, what are the forms I need to fill out?’ and it’s populating,” she stated.

“And then that agent will be able to repurpose to also start to solve customer support problems because it’s not like you just write an agent and it only solves one thing.” Importantly, she said the agent is “solving customer problems,” too. The output has applications for areas such as marketing and audience segmentation.

“Some of our most powerful use cases are things like creating audiences, like I can take outside signals in data,” she stated. Using internal data, Best Buy looks to AI solutions to then inform how it will target those audiences. “Now I have LLMs that will mash all that data together and tell me exactly how to target someone,” Barry said.

“If they’ve been lapsed, I can pick them at just the right moment because I’m seeing the right demand signals, target them, and we’re seeing improved — an improved ability to bring that customer back to the brand.” Charts & Data Best Buy online marketplace boosts sales in fiscal Q2 2027 Abbas Haleem | Aug 28, 2026