PetSmart's marketing team deployed AI-powered decisioning to drive incremental salon bookings across its network of nearly 1,700 grooming locations. The AI engine, built on Databricks and Hightouch, tested thousands of combinations of subject lines, offers, timing and creative to identify which messages resonated most with each pet parent, ultimately delivering a 22% lift in incremental salon bookings (Retail TouchPoints).
The approach reflects a human-AI collaboration model: PetSmart's marketing team sets objectives, guardrails and creative assets, while AI continuously evaluates customer signals in real time and recommends the next best action for each individual customer (Retail TouchPoints). This frees marketers to focus on strategy, analysis and creative thinking rather than manual optimization. For commerce practitioners, the case demonstrates how first-party data—PetSmart leverages more than 80 million Treats Rewards members—combined with predictive modeling enables personalization at scale across owned channels like email, push and SMS (Retail TouchPoints).