By Sachin Mohan · AIM Media House
Chewy CEO Sumit Singh recently addressed agentic commerce on the company's Q4 2025 earnings call in March. The financial results got most of the coverage but the AI strategy section was the more interesting story.
In May 2026, Fast Company published an investigation into the state of agentic commerce in which Google and OpenAI's commerce leads said the tipping point where AI shopping becomes commonplace is months away, not years. Since then, Walmart disclosed on its Q1 earnings call that Sparky users spend 35% more per order.
Lowe's disclosed that Mylow converts at triple the rate of non-users. Mastercard launched Agent Suite for merchant payments. Visa launched its agentic commerce infrastructure. Every week, the agentic commerce conversation moves from theory into evidence. Chewy has already worked out its answer.
And the answer is structurally specific in a way that most retailers have not articulated. The Autoship Argument The standard retail AI concern about agentic commerce is disintermediation.
An AI agent routes a consumer to a brand's DTC site or a competing platform rather than the retailer they would have visited in a traditional search. For a commodity retailer selling undifferentiated products, that is a real structural risk. For Chewy, Singh argued, the risk calculus is fundamentally different.
"If you're selling a commodity, I think the disintermediation issue is likely one that needs paying attention," Singh said on the call.
"But from that point of view, we believe Chewy is quite well insulated, given our value proposition is not primarily search aggregation and because our customer relationship is not primarily built around onetime discovery." More than 84% of Chewy's net sales run through Autoship, its automated recurring subscription ordering system.
A consumer who has their dog food, flea medication, and prescription pharmacy running on Autoship is not asking an AI agent where to buy those things.
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