Best Buy is expanding its AI capabilities across both internal operations and customer-facing channels in 2026. The retailer rolled out Ask Blue, a new conversational AI shopping and support assistant, which combines product knowledge, customer reviews, availability, and pricing to help shoppers make informed purchasing decisions (Digital Commerce 360 - AI). The assistant enables use cases such as product comparisons, compatibility checks, and connections to human support specialists when needed.
Beyond Ask Blue, Best Buy has partnered with OpenAI to integrate commerce capabilities into ChatGPT, allowing customers to discover products, receive recommendations, and complete purchases directly within the AI platform (Digital Commerce 360 - AI). Best Buy CEO Corie Barry has positioned AI as "a huge enabler of growth" and emphasized internal use cases such as employee-facing agents and audience segmentation powered by large language models to identify and re-engage lapsed customers at optimal moments (Digital Commerce 360 - AI).
For commerce practitioners, Best Buy's strategy underscores the competitive importance of meeting customers in AI-native environments. Rather than driving traffic to owned channels alone, the retailer is positioning itself at the point of AI-assisted discovery and decision-making—a shift that reflects broader industry recognition that agentic commerce and conversational interfaces are becoming primary pathways to purchase.