Chewy eyes $50M in annual cost savings with AI

An article from Dive Brief The pet supplies retailer is deploying AI tools in customer care, pharmacy and vet services to bolster productivity as it sets its sights on agentic capabilities. Published Sept. 11, 2026 ciodive.com Permission granted by Chewy This audio is auto-generated. Please let us know if you have feedback. Dive Brief: Chewy is pursuing financial gains amid its AI journey, executives told investors during the company’s Q2 2027 earnings call Wednesday. The pet supplies retailer projects $50 million in annual cost savings due to AI-related initiatives starting in it s 2027 fiscal year. The company’s launch of AI-enabled tools in customer care, pharmacy and vet services are helping lower variable costs, reduce manual labor and improve productivity, CEO Sumit Singh said during the earnings call. Chewy’s AI-powered assistant Cai — released to a group of customers during the second quarter — resolved roughly 30% of self-service chats regarding orders, account management and the company’s subscription service, Autoship. Under the covers, Chewy’s efforts to build out AI infrastructure and gather clean data will power its agentic capabilities, Singh said. “We will continue to innovate behind this new technology and utilize it to improve experience and drive deeper customer engagement,” he said. Dive Insight: Chewy is preparing for an agentic future, building infrastructure to support new capabilities as they’re developed, in a bid to realize AI-driven cost savings. The retailer is not alone. Enterprises are set to more than double their spending on agenticand generative AI in 2026, according to Gartner data released earlier this year. Total global AI spend will grow by nearly $1 trillion. At Chewy, AI-enabled tools are transforming customer signals into intelligent insights, Singh told investors. Meanwhile, AI is also helping automate data extraction in pharmacy services. The company also launched an AI-powered voice assistant called Callie at some Chewy Vet Care locations to assist with confirming appointments and scheduling follow-ups. The company said AI initiatives contributed savings in the low tens of millions during the previous fiscal year. “As our automated facilities continue to scale and utilization improves, we are leveraging the fixed cost infrastructure embedded within the network while also reducing variable costs through automation, process improvements and AI-enabled tools,” CFO Chris Deppe said during the earnings call. With an eye toward supporting agentic AI capabilities, Chewy spent several quarters building out infrastructure and focusing on the data being right, including crafting a multiagent orchestration framework. The ability to layer agentic capabilities on prepared infrastructure will lead to deeper connections between existing capabilities, Singh said. “We believe we have a durable competitive advantage here because companies will take years to get to this point or they’ll essentially have to go out and integrate through third-party providers, where all of our solution is first-party built,” Singh said. The average number of AI agents deployed by organizations nearly tripled from February 2025 to April 2026, according to a Salesforce report. The average time companies spent building and launching an agent fell to just under two days, a 53% decrease over the analysis period, which the enterprise software company said indicates a shift from experimentation to implementation.