For Academy Sports and Outdoors, the term omnichannel no longer refers solely to the integration between a retailer’s website, mobile app and physical store; it now includes artificial intelligence (AI) platforms, such as the large-language models (LLMs) OpenAI’s ChatGPT and Google’s Gemini.
And like integrating any other channel into the retailer’s operations, that means connecting the data. Sumit Anand, chief information officer at Academy Sports and Outdoors, told Digital Commerce 360 that it starts with product catalogs.
It “all boils down to how we mature our product feeds for one of them [the channels], and that can be scaled across the others,” Anand said. “So from an ecosystem perspective, the world doesn’t change much. From a scale perspective, it’s just a matter of getting it right and continuing to mature it because the refinement in this is going to be key.”
That scaling is critical for retailers that have thousands, or hundreds of thousands, of stock-keeping units (SKUs). Anand said Academy Sports enhances its product attributes — and by extension, its feeds — in “waves, by department. There’s a whole method that we follow. Otherwise, this could be a never-ending thing.”
Academy Sports and Outdoors is currently 142nd in the Top 2000 Database. The database ranks North America’s largest online retailers by their annual ecommerce sales and more.
Academy Sports works AI platforms into omnichannel strategy
Anand said Academy Sports creates product feeds that connect its catalog to its website, mobile app, LLMs and external marketplaces such as DoorDash’s, which the retailer has been on for about a year and a half.
To make these omnichannel experiences work, he said, Academy Sports starts with findability on the site. That includes focusing on data, consumers’ carts, attribution, product searchability and presentment, he said. Landing pages must have the prerequisite product attributes, he said, but also “inviting” visuals.
And when it comes to product discovery, Anand said Academy Sports is working on moving from static search toward agentic search. That refers to using agentic AI tools to allow conversational, natural-language phrasing to look up products.
To make all this happen, Anand said, Academy Sports is using AI for content enrichment. That means adding metadata to products to make it easier for other AI tools to discover and display those products for consumers.
He gave an example that a product could have a dozen attributes at first.
“Then we’ll have scraping services that’ll help us inform and add another five,” Anand said. “Then we have this AI tool that we’re using that goes on the web and figures out: Are there any other attributes that could increase searchability or findability? And that comes up with a list of attributes that we can add.”
From there, Academy Sports’ merchandising team — humans — looks at the attributes to determine which of them are most relevant for the retailer’s website based on its customer base.
Academy Sports wants to ‘modernize’ its GEO approach
Anand also said Academy Sports is on the short list of retailers partnering with Google on four initiatives:
- Universal Commerce Protocol, or UCP, to facilitate the agentic commerce in Google’s AI Mode. The UCP is an open standard Google co-developed with Shopify. It determines how agentic AI and ecommerce platforms can interact.
- Conversational Attributes Pilot. This helps retailers make their product catalogs “AI-ready” and improve discovery in Google’s AI Mode.
- Direct Offers Pilot. Direct offers allows advertisers to present exclusive offers for shoppers who are ready to buy directly in AI Mode.
- Business Agent. Google called this tool a virtual sales associate that can answer product questions in a brand’s voice. Business Agent is live with Lowe’s, Michael’s, Poshmark and Reebok, among other retailers, Google said.
“And we really believe once we launch these pilots with Google, it really is going to set our product feeds on a maturity set that allows us to modernize our GEO efforts,” he said.
Similar to search engine optimization (SEO), generative engine optimization (GEO) is a practice in which brands seek to improve how their products and web pages rank in search results. However, it centers around how LLMs rank and discover online content using a mix of text- and image-based attributes.
Better attributes lead to “better searchability or findability, [which] leads to higher conversion,” Anand said. “We’re starting with the basics.”
How Academy Sports enables omnichannel fulfillment
Ultimately, Academy Sports’ goals are to reduce its cart abandonment rate, increase the units it sells per transaction and average order value (AOV) and “drive stickiness” to its site. Each of those goals directly ties into how it manages its product catalog, which enables discovery across channels.
Academy Sports still has to fulfill those orders, keeping track of them across channels. The feeds update “on a frequent basis,” he said, to reflect product fulfillment. Its order management system decrements inventory when the product is delivered or paid for, depending on the channel’s settings.
To enable that from an enterprise perspective, Anand said, Academy Sports has invested “a significant amount” into its merchandising and supply chain platforms.
Academy Sports is also looking at “platforms that ingest a lot of contextual data to give us more insights.”
On the merchandising side, he said, that includes leveraging AI applications to determine demand in a predictive manner. And on the supply chain side, Academy Sports uses its order management system and Manhattan Associates. It also relies on buy online, pick up in store (BOPIS) and shipping from stores for fulfillment.
“You’ve got brick and mortars, you’ve got e-com, but in the agentic world that we’re living in, this space is changing, I would say, on a weekly basis,” Anand said. “So it’s a constant: How do we reinvent the way we want to show up to our customers, make it easy for them, enable an experience that really, really takes any friction out of the whole experience for them?”
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