JD Sports to sell directly through AI platforms

It means shoppers will be able to purchase the retailer’s sports footwear, apparel and accessories within platforms such as Microsoft Copilot, Google Gemini and ChatGPT.

JD has partnered with AI platform Commercetools and payments platform Stripe, leveraging their Agentic Commerce Suite to connect AI-driven search to secure checkout and payments.

The service will be available to customers in the US and will launch on Copilot in the coming months, with other AI platforms to follow. JD will complete the rollout in the UK and Europe when the capabilities become available.

It comes as the retailer found that 60% of 18-to-24-year-olds in the US use artificial intelligence as part of their shopping journeys, whether for product research or recommendations.

JD Sports chief technology and transformation officer Jetan Chowk told Retail Week: ”We really foresee AI playing a big role in evolving the customer experience.

“All the science and research that we’re seeing shows that the customer is leveraging AI when it comes to browsing and purchasing behavior, especially the younger consumer.

“Our job is to provide the best customer experience across all our channels. We want to be early within this space, purely because we want to shape the experience, not chase it.

“This is our first big push when it comes to transactional AI commerce. The first part of that is discovery and citation of the JD brand in the large language models [LLMs], which we’re working really hard to make sure we’re visible and enriched with the right sort of product information, brand information, to ensure that JD is at the forefront in terms of the outputs of what the LLMs produce.”

Chowk said the retailer would also soon be trialling a conversational AI search on its website in the UK and in some of its European businesses. “Instead of typing a descriptive search keyword, you would actually search as if you’re asking a question as a human. 

“For example, you can search ‘show me the Nike trainers that are under £100’ on the site, and it will drive more of a personalised experience through that shopping journey to help the customer with product choice, discovering and researching the products through our commerce platform,” he added.

JD Sports chief executive Régis Schultz said: “This agreement places JD right at the forefront of AI commerce. We want to reach customers wherever shopping decisions are happening, and make it easy for them to complete a purchase.

“This strengthens our digital proposition for customers, and keeps us moving in line with the fast-changing retail landscape.

“We see AI as a real opportunity to improve our customers’ experience with JD, as well as making our own operations more efficient, and so I’m really pleased that with this big step forward, we are putting our words into action.”

JD is not the first sports retailer to tap into agentic commerce, with rival Sports Direct owner launching its own offer in October.