Your golf swing may be landing your ball in the sandpit.
Your baseball glove might remain empty most of the time.
Your tennis game might not be giving you any “love.”
That’s okay: Emily Silver will still think of you as an athlete rather than merely a customer.
Speaking at the Adobe Summit in Las Vegas this week, the senior vice-president and “athlete experience officer” at Dick’s Sporting Goods described her brand’s role as not simply being a place to buy equipment, but serving as a partner in an athlete’s journey. That means helping athletes get started, improve, compete and stay connected to a sport throughout their lives.
This subtle mindset shift helps Dick’s behave less like a traditional retailer and more a conduit for success in sports, Silver explained. As a result, the company needs to think well beyond typical customer journeys such as researching online and then visiting a store or a web site. The athlete journeys include moving from practice to game day, from home to store or even from recreational to competitive.
“When you see someone as an athlete, the relationship becomes longer term, it becomes more personal,” she said during the Adobe Summit second day keynote session, which was broadcast online. “You’re no longer just asking what they want to buy. Today, you’re thinking about where they are in a sport. What are they trying a new sport, and what are they trying to achieve how you can support their progress.”
Dick’s will be accomplishing that in part by using Adobe’s AI-powered Brand Concierge to power offer personalized recommendations on the products to achieve an athletic goal, as well as coaching to improve their techniques and overall performance.
Beyond Brand Concierge, Dick’s has also adopted Adobe GenStudio, to manage its content assets and produce more variations in less time. Silver also mentioned House of Sport, a series of physical locations that offer batting cages, rock walls and golf simulators for athletes to hone their skills. This gives the athlete experience a differentiated in-person component, Silver said.
“With these stores, we have all sorts of experiences. We have we host birthdays, we host camps. Many of the house of sports have a field, and so we do our programming for the local community,” she said. “And then we layer on technology that allows us to extend and personalize these experience so whether it’s capturing performance data or connecting services so they’re cohesive and making sure that we’re always engaging with the athlete in a consistent way.”
Vlad Rak, Dick’s CTO, said the brand believes in getting hands-on with the tools and environments it sets up for athletes rather than waiting to see if they resonate.
“We’ve put this model through activation squads, where we have dedicated business and technology teams that go against these experiences and help us think about AI in a very different way,” he said.
Making effective use of AI might almost be considered its own team sport, Silver suggested, particularly as agentic capabilities become a part of everyday shopping. This is an area that Dick’s is studying closely.
“Building relationships is no longer about just engaging with customers. It’s also how you build a relationship with (AI) agents, which is something I’m still wrapping my head around,” she admitted. “Those dual relationships are incredibly important for the future.”
Selected sessions from Adobe Summit 2026 are available on demand for registered attendees.