Dick's Sporting Goods is putting an AI agent inside its app, and it picked the most on-brand name imaginable: Coach. The retailer this week introduced Coach by DICK'S, an agentic, conversational assistant that begins rolling out in its mobile app in June, according to the company's announcement. Through natural conversation, the tool is built to recommend products based on a shopper's sport, skill level, and goals, serve up training "Pro Tips," and walk customers through decisions about gear and services.
It's built on Adobe's Brand Concierge platform, layered with Dick's own content and product expertise, Retail Dive reported. The retailer is also leaning on Adobe Experience Platform to unify customer signals and Adobe Journey Optimizer to coordinate across channels — the unglamorous plumbing that determines whether an "AI coach" actually remembers you between sessions or just acts like a search bar with a personality. Dick's first signaled the partnership with Adobe back in April, Chain Store Age noted, so this is the productization of a plan that's been in motion for two months.
The real race is for the front door
Strip away the sports framing and this is the same move Endcap has been tracking all spring. Salesforce wants retailers running its agents. PayPal and Hey Savi just lit up agentic checkout in the UK. The thread connecting them is a single strategic anxiety: if shoppers start their journey by asking a general-purpose AI — ChatGPT, Gemini, Amazon's Rufus — what running shoes to buy, the retailer becomes a fulfillment endpoint, not a destination. Whoever owns the conversation owns the margin.
Dick's answer is to make the conversation worth having on its own turf. A general AI can compare specs; it can't credibly tell a high-school cross-country runner which trainer fits a specific gait the way a store associate might. By grounding Coach in proprietary product knowledge and "athlete needs," Adobe framed the pitch around the one thing Dick's has that a horizontal assistant doesn't: category expertise and first-party data on what its customers actually play.
Worth watching, not yet worth believing
The skeptical read is equally obvious. "Agentic" is the most over-claimed word in retail right now, and a June rollout "with expanded capabilities planned over time," as SGB Media described it, is a soft launch by any other name. The test isn't whether Coach can chat — every retailer will have a chatbot by the holidays. It's whether it can actually close the loop: understand intent, recommend the right product, and complete a purchase without dumping the shopper back into a standard product grid.
If it works, Dick's gets a defensible, differentiated reason for athletes to open its app instead of a marketplace search box — and a richer data trail to personalize everything downstream. If it doesn't, it's another assistant customers tap once and forget. Either way, the strategic logic is sound: in a year when every shopping journey is starting to run through an AI, the retailers that don't build their own front door will be renting someone else's.