With the rollout of an agentic AI coaching tool, DICK’S Sporting Goods completes a digital ecosystem spanning loyalty, youth sports and real-time personalization.
In February 2026, DICK’S Sporting Goods briefly ranked third on the Apple App Store’s free-download chart, ahead of Google’s Gemini and just behind OpenAI’s ChatGPT and Anthropic’s Claude. The jump had a clear trigger: controversy over Anthropic’s federal government contracts boosted Claude downloads and lifted nearby apps in the rankings. Still, the bigger takeaway was that a sporting goods retailer showed up on that list at all.
Now, DICK’S Sporting Goods has announced Coach by DICK’S, an AI assistant rolling out inside the DICK’S mobile app. The retailer has been building the foundation for this for years: customer data, behavioral data and deep product knowledge. Coach brings it together in one place.
Step one: the consumer app and an activity-based data flywheel
DICK’S digital strategy runs through ScoreCard, the retailer’s free loyalty program. Members earn one point per dollar spent across the portfolio. At 300 points, they receive a $10 reward.
The differentiator is MOVE, a fitness-tracking feature built into the DICK’S app. It connects to Apple Health, Fitbit and Garmin. Members can earn three points a day by logging 10,000 steps, three miles or 30 minutes of activity. That design keeps customers engaged and generating data even when they are not shopping. It ties the relationship to sporting behavior, not just transactions.
CEO Lauren Hobart pointed to the shift on the company’s Q3 2025 earnings call in November, saying the retailer was “really leaning into our app experience” as part of its broader e-commerce strategy.
The app also offers product launch reservations, in-store barcode scanning, price matching and a digital rewards hub for the ScoreRewards credit card. Each feature adds another reason to keep the app installed between purchases.
DICK’S Sporting Goods consumer app
Step two: GameChanger as an entry point in the athlete ecosystem
Alongside its consumer loyalty push, DICK’S Sporting Goods has built a second digital touchpoint in youth sports through GameChanger, a team-management app that handles scheduling, live scoring, stats and video streaming for youth leagues and recreational teams. The platform functions as an on-ramp into the broader DICK’S ecosystem, and CEO Lauren Hobart has said GameChanger users are among the company’s highest-value shoppers.
The user base is sizeable. In the first quarter of fiscal 2025, DICK’S reported more than 6.5 million unique active users on GameChanger and an average of roughly 2.2 million daily active users, up 28 percent year-over-year.
Unlike the main DICK’S app, GameChanger is not designed for shopping. Its value lies in the data it generates on sports participation, team affiliation and activity frequency outside the point-of-sale record. DICK’S Media Network uses first-party signals from both e-commerce and GameChanger to target advertising across digital and live sports channels, including parents following a child’s games in real time.
Step three: The Adobe partnership behind Coach by DICK’S
In Las Vegas in April 2026, DICK’S Sporting Goods and Adobe announced a partnership focused on consumer experience, personalization and content production. The announcement effectively laid out the architecture DICK’S has been building toward.
The centerpiece is Adobe Brand Concierge, the technology that powers Coach by DICK’S. Built on agentic AI – software designed to take goal-directed actions autonomously – and trained on DICK’S product catalog, sport expertise and service knowledge, Coach is positioned as an in-app guide. It recommends gear based on sport, skill level and stated goals, and it offers training tips and navigation across products and services.
The partnership also extends beyond the assistant itself. Adobe said DICK’S will use enterprise tools for personalization and content production, including Adobe Experience Platform for aggregating behavioral data and Adobe GenStudio and Firefly Services for generating branded content variations.
DICK’S CTO Vlad Rak said the strategy is to make AI capabilities – powered by the retailer’s knowledge of athletes and sport – “the pillar” of its operations “from stores to online, from shopping to performance services.”
An AI-native sport retailer: the emerging template
DICK’S is positioning its app-led AI push on top of capabilities it has been building for years. On its Q3 2025 earnings call, Hobart said the company was already using AI for teammate scheduling, merchandise assortment planning and RFID (radio frequency identification) automation that helps locate and dispatch products faster across its store network.
In announcing the partnership, Adobe cited its own data showing that during the 2025 holiday season, AI-driven traffic to retail sites rose 693 percent year-over-year as shoppers used AI tools to find products and deals.
Taken together, Coach by DICK’S fits into a broader system in which the app ecosystem functions less as a storefront than as an engagement engine.
It aggregates signals from purchase history, fitness activity via MOVE, youth sports participation via GameChanger, media consumption through DICK’S Media Network and now AI-assisted product guidance. The aim is clear: increase engagement, reduce price-driven choices and lift customer lifetime value.
Among European sporting goods retailers, there is no documented example at comparable scale of a single app combining fitness-linked loyalty, youth sports community management and AI-powered coaching.
For many European platforms and retailers, DICK’S is not so much an immediate competitive threat as a structural reference point for what an AI-native sporting goods company could look like.
