Pets at Home has completely transformed its business with the launch of a new, company-wide digital platform, whilst also becoming an early adopter of Microsoft’s genAI agents. Retail Systems news editor Alexandra Leonards speaks to the retailer’s chief information officer, William Hewish, to explore the pet care chain’s technology strategy and plans to complete an omnichannel vision that will see the organisation connect – via a single app – everything from pet food subscriptions and vet appointments to reminders about flea treatments.

A year of transformation

2024 has been a busy year for Pets at Home. Over the past 12 months, the British pet care giant has launched a new digital platform that spans its in-store and online touchpoints, whilst also becoming an early adopter of Microsoft’s groundbreaking generative AI (genAI) agents.

The retailer’s latest technology investments form part of its wider digital transformation strategy, which at its core looks to master the omnichannel experience across its e-commerce site, 450 stores, 450 partner vet practices, and pet grooming services.

The company’s approach means it collects a vast amount of first-party data, pooled from across the online and in-store journey, with its new platform storing the info of 10 million pets and eight million customers. With the help of its data science team, Pets at Home can identify which pet food or items its customers are buying and the frequency of those purchases, meaning it can predict when they are most likely to start thinking about buying another product, giving the company the ability to make hyper-accurate recommendations.

“That’s where we use our data to work out which customers we need to get in front of and at which point in the cycle we need to do this in order for us to be relevant at that point in time,” says Pets at Home chief information officer (CIO) William Hewish. “We use that to drive vouchers that are relevant to customers on products they normally buy.”

He tells Retail Systems that the business is using this method at scale to produce millions of unique vouchers; a far cry from when, about 10 years ago, it used to give large cohorts of people the same discount or benefit.

The company’s new data platform is also connected to the devices held by all 12,000 of the company’s store employees, giving them access to customer data such as breed and age of pets.

“The customer that we see arrive in store is the same customer that we just saw online,” says Hewish.

Expanding the omnichannel journey

While Pets at Home has mastered the omnichannel journey across stores and online, its new digital platform is currently very retail-based, which means it hasn’t yet incorporated some of the other important parts of the company.

Hewish says that the next stage of its omnichannel strategy will be integrating the vet side of the business, with the retailer currently moving into a pilot for a cloud-based solution which will also sit on the company’s new digital platform.

Pets at Home runs a joint venture partnership with hundreds of UK vet practices which are run independently from the business.

“At the point when we start to switch the vets on, if you’re a customer of a practice you’ll then receive in-app notifications and reminders for flea treatment, you’ll be able to book your vet on there, or ask the practice questions,” continues Hewish.

He says that this final piece of the puzzle is what will really bring Pets at Home’s total ecosystem into the hands of customers.

Beyond its omnichannel goals, with UK retailers Marks & Spencer and Mid Counties Co-op recently revealing that they are looking to the digitalisation of refrigeration monitoring or self-checkouts to drive efficiencies following Labour’s recent Budget, is Pets at Home also planning to further ramp up its tech strategy to cope with the costs associated with higher National Insurance Contributions and a hike in minimum wage?

“We already have a strategy in place to use technology to improve the service that we give to customers in order to improve our range and make ourselves more efficient,” explains the CIO. “I think all the Budget has done really is to shine a big, bright light on it to make sure that it really becomes one of the key things that we need to be looking at.

“I think that is really where AI is paying for us in that space; we're quite lucky that we're ahead of the curve with the use of some key technologies quite early on.”

Implementing genAI

Hewish previously carved out from his existing team a head of AI transformation; Simon Ellis has been in the role for around four months.

Ellis’ team is focused on the company’s major strategic partnerships – including with Microsoft – to explore advanced tools that are most viable for the company, which are then piloted in an “innovation style”.

“So, we'll try things out – it works, or it doesn't work,” says Hewish. “We throw some away and focus on the ones that work.”

This approach has allowed the company to innovate at a faster pace, he explains, highlighting the importance for large retailers to have a team solely dedicated to genAI.

“You need a team that's just kind of combing through that noise and picking out what is an actual, real, tangible product in the market that you can turn into deliverables, and you can drive out,” continues Hewish. “And I think if we tried to do that in the normal organisation, that could get caught up in prioritisation and we’re busy all of the time.”

The retailer’s partnership with Microsoft began a long while before it partnered on the rollout of the tech giant’s newly launched genAI agents. The close relationship between the two businesses meant it had early insight into what Microsoft was developing and what it was focused on.

Agents are AI tools that can work on behalf of an individual or team to operate and orchestrate business activities. They range from simple prompt-and-response agents to fully autonomous agents. Microsoft's Copilot facilitates interaction with these agents. 

“Microsoft knew that we were already hungry for this kind of technology and that we had a team that was able to receive it and do something quickly with it, and we’re quite quick to turn things around as an organisation,” adds the CIO. “When we decide we want to do something, we put all of our weight behind it and off we go.”

Hewish continues: “So, I think we probably pressed a few buttons for Microsoft as well as us needing the technology here.”

Pets at Home was one of a handful of companies globally that went into early development of the technology.

The business chose a small, contained area to trial the genAI agent in: a fraud team.

Hewish said that the organisation picked the team because measuring the value of the technology can be achieved easily and quickly when dealing with tangible fraud figures.

“That gets some kind of confidence behind it, and then you can go into fuzzier areas where you know it's less tangible, but you know it's the right thing to do,” he adds.

Following the fraud trial, the business is planning to move it out at scale across the organisation and looking for prompt engineers to help with the rollout.

Pets at Home has also recently gone live with a Large Language Model (LLM) from Salesforce in the contact centre, another example of early adoption, with the technology only having been out for six months or so.

The technology sits in the background, guiding contact centre agents with suggested answers that they can cut and paste or change; as well as pointing staff to knowledge articles that help them with responses to incoming customer queries. The tool can also summarise and wrap up conversations so that staff can close a call immediately after it finishes without needing to make further notes.

Pets at Home also has half a dozen other areas in which it is currently exploring AI, which it is getting some great results from.

“We’ll do a quick pilot, and if the pilot's good, we roll it out,” he explains. “You’ve got to be pretty agile with this technology.

“It’s one you've got to move fairly quickly with; then get the benefits out as fast as you can.”

What’s next for AI

Pets at Home has a system whereby each of the retailer’s executives takes responsibility for a key area in which they’d like to AI to be rolled out. This means the company essentially has a hit list of departments or processes it plans to use the technology in; these include areas which are data-intensive, like supply chain.

The organisation is currently looking at how it can free up time for its workforce using genAI.

“We know for sure that when colleagues talk to customers, we get more sales, so freeing them up from tasks is a really, really important thing to do,” says Hewish. “From a technology perspective, it’s really nice because you develop that capability once and deploy it 12,000 times; so you get a really significant return on your investment.”

The company has already rolled out a trial for a ChatGPT-style front-end tool which sits on store employee devices. The technology looks similar to OpenAI’s model; however, it is an in-house version which sits on the Azure platform, meaning it is not open to people outside of the company.

The tool has been fed with all of the company’s documentation which would normally be given to the store manager, such as the maternity process or holiday forms, so that staff can ask it questions.

While the technology is only at the trial stage at the moment, with Pets at Home keen to make sure the tool is delivering accurate answers, it is proving successful with employees because they can cut straight through to what they need without needing to phone somebody in the support office.

Next 5 years

Looking ahead, the company predicts that it will become “truly omnichannel”.

“We are seeing that if we introduce a store customer to online, they don't disappear from the store, we actually increase the share of wallet with the customer,” explains Hewish. “So, from a digital perspective, it is about really enhancing that and bringing all of the data that we've got to make it really easy for customers to shop across the two channels – using one to inform the other.”

But he says that the key benefit of technology for retailers like Pets at Home over the next few years will be bringing AI into the hands of colleagues to “supercharge” them.

“I really think that the next big step is AI working alongside colleagues to make them more efficient, give them better information, and help them have better conversations with customers,” explains the CIO.

Pets at Home’s digital transformation shows no signs of slowing, with the business positioning itself as a key leader not just in the pet market but in the wider retail industry. Its retailer counterparts would be wise to follow in the company’s stead by utilising advanced technology to truly master the omnichannel journey and understand their customers, developing an AI team, and creating a true culture of innovation. Ultimately, the company has been able to achieve this by sticking to a simple strategy of working innovatively and efficiently towards meeting the brand’s overall purpose of “creating a better world for pets and the people who love them”.

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