By: Sumit Singh, Chewy CEO
Reading Time: 9 Minutes
The Central Idea: There is growing debate among investors and practitioners that AI agents will reshape consumer search and shopping behavior, potentially disintermediating retailers and pressuring demand and profitability.
What gets missed in this disruption narrative around AI is a simple but powerful truth: AI agents have very different implications on a company-by-company basis. For us at Chewy, it’s clear that AI agents will be a benefit. The likelihood of true disintermediation is materially lower, while the opportunity to capture incremental demand through new interfaces is meaningfully higher.
Why? Because in a category defined by trust, recurring need, emotional attachment, and regulated complexity, the retailer that combines low price, dependable fulfillment, embedded healthcare, and deep customer relationships is not disintermediated, it is advantaged.
I was at an investor conference recently, and AI was, of course, a central topic. Leaders shared stories of what was (and wasn’t) working at their organizations, while investors tried to grapple with separating signal from noise and figuring out what represents scalable, durable value creation versus value transfer. What became clear is that AI’s impact and implications vary widely, not just across sectors but at the individual company level.
So, what are the specific implications for Chewy? As the CEO, I hear lots of theories about how agentic shopping will disrupt online retail. I don’t dispute that change is coming, and the risks are real and worth framing clearly. For starters, AI agents will increasingly shape product discovery and could shift traffic away from traditional digital storefronts, raising the question of whether the customer relationship migrates upstream. Over time, agents may also compress differentiation in transactional, price-led retail categories, intensify competition at the margin, and put pressure on profit pools such as sponsored advertising.
But at Chewy specifically, those broad assumptions don’t apply.
In fact, a thorough understanding of Chewy reveals that it stands to benefit from the advent of agentic shopping protocols (such as the ACP and UCP) developed by OpenAI and Google, or AI agents acting on customers’ behalf (such as Perplexity’s Comet). While AI agents will actively reshape consumer discovery and purchase behavior, applying generic agentic disruption fears to Chewy misses the fundamentals.
In the points below, I outline AI agent risks for retailers and explain what sets Chewy apart from the pack:
- Chewy’s “pet parent” customers are not your average consumer. Pet is a large (~$160 billion U.S.1), growing, and recession-resilient category. More than two-thirds of U.S. households own pets, and 82% of pet owners view pets as their children.1 December 2025 research (commissioned by Hill’s Pet Nutrition and administered online by Talker Research) found that the average pet parent worries about how happy their pets are 11 times per day and worries about their pets’ health 10 times per day. Pet owners pay more attention to their pets’ diet and health needs over themselves (91% vs. 86%), and roughly a third spend more on their pets’ health than their own.1 Pet parenting is a full-time responsibility and a source of personal identity. Given the deep emotional bonds, pet-related purchases are not commodity consumption, and not easily delegated.
- Chewy is not your average retailer. Nearly 25% of U.S. pet households choose Chewy as their primary pet care destination. Chewy is ranked #1 by Forrester for customer experience (as per the U.S. Retail Total Experience Index), and over 80% of net sales are on Autoship, our recurring delivery subscription service. Moreover, Chewy is an integrated pet care platform: Chewy Pharmacy is the largest online pet pharmacy in the U.S., supported by a fast-growing network of Chewy-owned vet clinics. That deep, ongoing customer relationship reflects an unusual degree of brand trust and love that will be an advantage in an agent-driven world, as we’ll see shortly.
- Chewy is already the cheapest retailer:The most common argument for agentic commerce disruption is that AI agents will price-shop differently from today’s human consumers. But that does not apply to Chewy. Consider how pricing actually works in the Pet category. Over 80% of spending is on food and medication, and more than 85% of Chewy’s revenue comes from these two categories (a high point in the industry). These food and medication products are protected by a pricing concept called MAP (“minimum advertised price”), which essentially sets a floor on the price and contractually prevents any retailer from selling below this threshold. The MAP is set by manufacturers (Nestle, Mars, Hills, Zoetis, etc.) and tightly protected by them. If a retailer attempts to break MAP, their supply will be cut off, or they will face other financial penalties. This creates transparency of pricing for consumers and protects companies like Chewy and others against bigger retailers, who cannot use these products as loss-leaders. Because we price at MAP at Chewy and our proprietary pricing technology allows us to swiftly respond to any changes by suppliers, Chewy customers get the most competitive pricing at all times. (Don’t just take my word for it: In Profitero+’s 2025 “Price Wars Study,” which compares the everyday online prices on over 10,000 items in 16 categories across 23 leading retailers, Chewy was ranked neck and neck with Amazon; other pet retailers including PetSmart, Petco, and Target had prices 3% to 16% higher.) In an agentic shopping world where the AI agent is comparing prices, Chewy will stand out above the rest.
- Chewy’s prices are even cheaper than they look and AI will recognize that. For skeptics who say Chewy’s low price advantage isn’t differentiated, let’s go a step deeper and look at combining price and speed of delivery. I mentioned Autoship earlier, our delivery subscription service. Customers receive a 35% discount on their first order, and an ongoing 5% savings on every order thereafter. This widens Chewy’s low price advantage gap (Autoship applies beyond food and meds, to toys, poop bags, pads, etc.). Further, Chewy’s network of 15 fulfillment centers and five pharmacy hubs can deliver over 90% of orders within 2 days or less. The volume of orders going through Autoship enables us to continually improve that speed, with industry-leading predictability and reliability. This structural advantage makes Chewy the low-cost, dependable retailer of choice, with deep customer loyalty. When AI agents scan where to place an order, Chewy will win not just that order but every subsequent reorder.
- Chewy Health supercharges Chewy’s moat: In 2024, over $3 billion (or one quarter) of Chewy’s net product sales were in health-related categories, from prescription medication to veterinary diets to supplements. Chewy also offers consumer services like pet insurance (CarePlus), veterinary “tele-triage” (“Connect with a Vet”), and a physical/digital integration that combines Chewy Vet Care (CVC) clinics with virtual care options. Why are these products and services particularly powerful in an age of agentic shopping? For one thing, a Chewy Health relationship removes the risk of unbundling by external agents. It also turbo-charges the Autoship value proposition: Agents can reorder an existing Rx (pending vet approval and refill limits). Further, pharmacy and vet diet food are governed by regulatory and operational barriers: Agents cannot legally or technically “price-shop” controlled medication.
- Chewy isn’t reliant on traditional search. AI can and will influence discovery. I do not dismiss this risk. But AI disintermediation is primarily an issue for customers buying a commodity like toothpaste or toilet paper. Chewy’s customer relationship is not primarily “search-aggregation” built around one-time discovery. We are a trusted, recurring, service-rich pet care destination. In the market where Chewy operates, “pet parents” prioritize a seamless, dependable experience that consistently meets their needs. That plays to our strengths.
- Chewy is embracing agentic interfaces. It has always been our objective at Chewy to be present wherever pet parents choose to shop. In the future, that includes emerging agentic interfaces, and that presents us with upside opportunity. I believe that these surfaces can meaningfully expand discovery and raise our brand awareness. In fact, we have been leading the innovation in the Pet industry on these surfaces. Chewy is amongst the first cohort of companies that launched with Google’s agentic pricing feature, and we plan to be amongst the first to come out with agentic check out. Our objective is not just traffic: It is to ensure Chewy remains the preferred, machine-readable, trusted pet care platform behind the transaction, so that as shopping interfaces evolve, we gain reach without giving up the economics of loyalty, service, and recurring demand.
- Chewy takes a differentiated approach to online ads. AI agents may reduce the impact of sponsored ads as profit drivers. But Chewy’s retail media value proposition isn’t the “single-transaction" bid model that the rest of the industry relies on. Our go-to-market in the Ads world is differentiated, unlocking more extensive lifetime value through Autoship. We are building a highly engaged pet audience, strong first-party data, recurring purchase behavior, and closed-loop conversion. This was proven once again at our annual vendor summits with our supplier partners, who continue to believe that Chewy is one of their most compelling platforms to build brand loyalty and powerful revenue layer cakes.
As I noticed so starkly during that recent investor conference, what gets missed in the disruption narrative around AI is a simple but powerful truth: AI agents have very different implications on a company-by-company basis. For us at Chewy, it’s clear that AI agents will be a benefit, because they route customers toward value and we quantitatively and inarguably deliver value. In a category defined by trust, recurring need, emotional attachment, and regulated complexity, the retailer that combines low price, dependable fulfillment, embedded healthcare, and deep customer relationships is not disintermediated; it is advantaged.
Chewy has spent years building exactly that system. Agentic interfaces will favor platforms that are predictable, compliant, and optimized for lifetime value, not one-off clicks. In that world, Chewy doesn’t sit at risk of being bypassed; it becomes the default endpoint. The interface may change, but the winner remains the same: the platform that owns trust, continuity, and care.
[1] Source: Packaged Facts.
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