The Next CX Battleground is Upstream
Ulta, Home Depot, and DICK’S point to a shift where AI starts influencing intent before the owned journey begins..
Your daily signal on AI and CX — minus the hype.
📌 DCX Stat of the day: In a 50-store pilot, Home Depot said its AI voice agents identified why a customer was calling in fewer than 10 seconds and got people to a solution four times faster than traditional phone menus. Home Depot
In this issue:
→ Ulta moves shopping into AI
→ Discovery shifts away from your site
→ Home Depot cuts phone friction
→ DICK’S builds a digital coach
→ Cars become service surfaces
🔎 Deep dive
Ulta is betting discovery will start somewhere else
Ulta Beauty and Google announced two moves that should get your attention. Ulta products are becoming shoppable inside Google’s AI Mode in Search and the Gemini app, with streamlined checkout for eligible purchases. Ulta is also launching Ulta AI across its own digital experience, using data from its 46+ million members to help shoppers narrow choice and buy faster.
Here’s the part that matters to you. Discovery, comparison, and even purchase are starting to happen inside an AI layer your brand does not fully control. You will feel that first in discovery and evaluation, where the assistant starts shaping what gets surfaced, compared, and trusted.
For your customer, that can mean less hunting and fewer dead ends. For you, it raises a harder question. If your product data is thin, your advice is generic, or your checkout handoff breaks, you may lose the customer before they ever reach your owned experience.
📬 Copy-Paste Take
Your next CX problem may start before the customer reaches your site. The AI layer is beginning to shape what they see, trust, and buy.
OPERATOR PLAYBOOK
Pressure-test your discovery-to-checkout handoff
Audit every AI-assisted shopping journey for four things:
Can the assistant access accurate product facts, availability, and eligibility in real time?
Can it explain tradeoffs clearly enough to help the customer decide?
Can the customer move to a human or owned channel without starting over?
Can checkout finish cleanly, with no surprises on price, stock, or fulfillment?
Then test whether your brand still plays a meaningful role after the assistant narrows the choice set.
Ask your team: If discovery keeps moving upstream into AI assistants, what are you doing right now to stay visible, useful, and easy to buy from?
Signal: The site visit is moving later in the journey. That changes the job of your content, data, and service design.
📈 Market Reality Check
AI discovery traffic is no longer a side channel
Adobe said AI traffic to U.S. retail sites rose 269% year over year in March 2026. That does not tell you everything, but it does tell you this is no longer fringe behavior. If AI systems are becoming a real channel for discovery and evaluation, you now have to care about what those systems understand about your products, offers, and brand truth.
What this does not prove is conversion quality, loyalty, or margin. More AI traffic can still mean weaker intent or more price-driven comparison. But the channel is clearly growing, and it is starting to influence the front end of the consumer journey faster than many teams expected.
Fast AI traffic growth + weak brand context = borrowed demand
🧰 Tool Worth Knowing
Adobe Brand Concierge
What it does: Adobe positions Brand Concierge as a conversational AI layer for brand-owned digital properties. In the DICK’S example, it is being used to guide customers from discovery to decision with personalized recommendations and coaching-style interactions.
CX use case: This is useful when your customers need help narrowing choice, building confidence, or matching a goal to the right basket.
Worth watching because: It gives you a middle path. You do not have to give all discovery to Google, ChatGPT, or the next assistant that shows up. You can build guided buying into your own experience, with your own data and rules.
Bottom line: Worth a look if your problem is guided decision-making at scale. Less interesting if your basics, product data, or handoffs are still broken.
NEW: The DCX AI Today - AI Tool Directory - If you lead a CX team and want a curated shortlist of tools worth evaluating, this is your starting point.
⚡ 90-Second CX Radar
Home Depot adds AI phone agents to store support
This matters because it goes after a customer moment people still hate: calling a store. Home Depot said the pilot let callers describe what they needed in natural language, kept a path to a human, and even started carts based on the project described on the call.
DICK’S wants a digital coach inside its app
The interesting part is not the phrase “digital coach.” It is the attempt to connect product knowledge, customer data, and journey orchestration so the guidance feels relevant across touchpoints. No rollout metrics were shared.
Volkswagen is turning the car into an AI service surface
Volkswagen said new China-built vehicles will get onboard AI agents from the second half of 2026, with the ability to handle tasks like finding top-rated restaurants and confirming reservations. That matters because post-purchase experience is expanding into daily decision support.
🧭 Your Move
Pick one consumer journey where an AI layer is already sitting between you and the customer. Product discovery is the obvious place to start. Store calls are another. Then ask the uncomfortable question: if the assistant became the first touch tomorrow, would it understand your offer well enough to sell it and recover cleanly when things go wrong?
Focus on three things.
Clean up the data that powers discovery.
Tighten the handoff into checkout or human help.
Decide which moments you want to own directly instead of renting from someone else’s interface.
You are no longer competing only on experience. You are competing on how well an AI can explain you.
Until tomorrow.
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