Product descriptions:
PetSmart aims to become every pet parent’s favorite pet retailer, combining unmatched selection with emotional, relevant experiences. With over 75 million Treats Rewards members and 1,700 locations, PetSmart serves pet families in moments of celebration and challenge. However, as traditional email and campaign testing plateaued, PetSmart set out to transform their customer engagement using Databricks and Hightouch’s AI Decisioning Agents. The result: measurable increases in salon bookings, autoship sign-ups and loyalty, all while bringing more joy to pets and their parents.
Modern marketing hits a wall in a competitive industry
Despite a large and loyal customer base, PetSmart needed to capture customers’ attention in a saturated digital environment and provide real personalization in marketing that was limited by traditional A/B testing and monthly campaign calendars. “Our core mission is to use data not just for business outcomes, but to give pet parents the most relevant, meaningful experience possible,” Bradley Breuer, Vice President of Marketing at PetSmart, said. With 94% of sales tied to loyalty members, vast amounts of customer and pet data live in Databricks. However, harnessing it for real-time decisioning and tailored outreach across lifecycle moments was elusive. Teams sought a way to move beyond one-size-fits-all marketing and unlock relevant engagement for every unique pet parent.
AI Decisioning Agents deliver personalization at scale
By partnering with Hightouch and leveraging Databricks as the centralized data source, PetSmart combined advanced AI models, real customer signals and intuitive controls for marketers — all inside one platform. “Databricks gave us the speed, accuracy and single source of truth to move quickly from insight to action, while Hightouch’s interface let our marketing team collaborate directly with the AI,” Bradley explained. Teams could build specific AI agents for every business priority — salon bookings, autoship, offer activation — set goals and guardrails, and orchestrate all messages through global and local decisioning logic.
Hightouch’s technology applied reinforcement learning and continuous experimentation to deliver the right message, offer and timing through owned channels. “Marketing teams can set clear goals and provide an action space for potential offers or messages while the system figures out the optimal treatment for each customer,” Tejas Manohar, Co-CEO of Hightouch, added. The result was an adaptive, always-improving campaign framework that engaged customers as individuals, not segments.
Crucially, transparency and control were built in. The PetSmart marketing team could see exactly why an AI agent made each decision, analyze creative and timing variables, and quickly iterate based on real results. “With Databricks and Hightouch together, our speed to market improved dramatically, and we could finally connect our data and insight to every touchpoint,” Bradley said.
Measurable uplift in bookings, transactions and loyalty
The impact of AI decisioning was immediate and significant. For the grooming salon business, campaigns powered by AI agents delivered a 22% incremental lift in bookings, while autoship campaigns supported a 13% improvement in transaction rates. “Even single percentage-point gains translate to substantial business value at our scale. These lifts shifted our mindset from chasing volume to truly serving each customer,” Bradley noted. The richer data feedback loop also helped creative and marketing teams refine messages, imagery and delivery strategies, fostering more relevant communications for pet parents.
PetSmart has already scaled these AI-powered approaches beyond email to app push notifications and other owned channels, bringing surround-sound personalization to millions of customers. Bradley summarized that “AI decisioning lets us orchestrate all our communications as a unified experience, delivering value and growing loyalty at every step in a pet’s life.”