Ecommerce Trends: How Chewy is using AI

As Chewy’s quarterly sales reached $3. 36 billion in its fiscal Q1 in 2026, the pet supplies and services seller credited artificial intelligence (AI) for helping it throughout the company.

“Based on our current road map and implementation progress, we continue to expect AI-driven efficiencies to contribute a low tens of millions of dollars benefit in fiscal 2026 with a more meaningful ramp expected into 2027 and beyond,” Chewy CEO Sumit Singh told analysts during its June earnings call.

Singh noted that Chewy was “embedding AI across multiple layers of the business,” specifically citing “customer service, pharmacy operations, fulfillment and marketing workflows” as examples where AI was in use. Ultimately, those deployments were the result of “foundational infrastructure required to deploy AI broadly across the enterprise,” he assessed.

Moreover, he said AI represented “a meaningful opportunity for Chewy, both from a customer experience perspective and from an operational efficiency standpoint.” Some of those AI efforts are specific to Chewy’s pet-health services, but others extend to broader parts of the business, impacting discovery, payments and site content. Chewy is No.

10 in the Top 2000 Database. The database tracks North America’s largest online retailers, ranking them by annual ecommerce sales and more. Digital Commerce 360 categorizes Chewy as a Specialty retailer.

How Chewy is using AI for veterinary services Singh went into detail during the Q1 earnings call to praise Chewy’s veterinary teams for delivering what he called “industry-leading productivity metrics, supported by the technology-enabled workflows and AI-assisted tools.”

As a result, he said, Chewy was seeing “vet retention and employee satisfaction” that outperformed its peers. “In a world where veterinarians are in short supply, this last point affords Chewy a structural advantage relative to peers as we look to scale our Vet Clinic footprint,” he stated. That business is important for Chewy.

In fact, Singh referred to pet health as “one of the largest and most compelling long-term opportunities for Chewy,” representing $54 billion of total addressable market. He characterized $40 billion of that total as being associated with “in-clinic products and veterinary services.”

“Approximately 40% of CVC [Chewy Vet Care] customers are new to Chewy, and these customers tend to reach a year one [net sales per active customer] of approximately $900,” he said. “Furthermore, existing Chewy customers who engage with CVC increase share of wallet meaningfully faster than other cohorts following their first visit.”

Chewy online sales by year Embedded AI in Chewy’s clinics During a May presentation at a conference held by J. P Morgan, Singh described where AI was having the greatest impact in its clinics. First, he explained that doctors saved time when patients first arrived, because AI agents were automatically scheduling and printing out triage reports.

Those actions, he said, cut down on time spent “pulling up data or understanding what the customer background and history is.” Next, the agents monitor conversations as they take place during customer appointments, making sure that the interactions are — in Singh’s words — “fully scribed.”

“So our agent is listening to this and fully scribes it in medical terminology back into the software that then hooks into our PIMS, practice integration management software, that then updates all customer records and vet records,” he explained.

“Post the appointment, the agent essentially is writing post follow-up notes so that the veterinarian neither has to enter data or the information nor do they have to write notes.” Singh credited those steps for freeing up as much as “two hours per day per veterinarian.” Third, he mentioned that AI enables clinics to carry “very minimal inventory.”

In turn, he said that result helps clinics’ balance sheets and makes them more profitable as they benefit from 24-hour pharmacy delivery to keep products moving out. What Chewy is doing with agentic AI During the J. P. Morgan conference, Singh summarized what two AI-specialized teams at Chewy have been working on.

Those teams were focused on agentic AI, which takes actions on behalf of customers. He related priorities for agentic AI to play key roles in the company’s future. “We are building — actively — interfaces into the agentic world,” he said.

“So a team at Chewy is focused on leading the integration and shaping protocol or commerce protocols for [the pet category] with the Googles of the world and the OpenAIs of the world.” However, commerce through agentic interfaces is only one part of that effort.

“And another team is essentially making sure that [search engine optimization] goes to agentic and Chewy is the one that feeds in catalog information, attribute data, content data, vet information, health information, because we are one of the largest purveyors of this type of information that exists on one platform,” Singh stat