Petbarn to move online checkout inside AI search

Petbarn-owner, Green Cross Pet Wellness, is working on agentic AI that will let it offer online shopping and other transactions entirely inside third-party search services such as Gemini and ChatGPT.

The group, which operates 260 Petbarn retail stores among its 15 other pet care and veterinary-related brands across Australia and New Zealand, said that it would be one of Google’s lead partners when it launches Gemini Checkout in the region later this year.

Speaking at Zendesk’s Future of Service customer event in Sydney, the company’s enterprise product general manager Rory Watt said “the future of agents for us is building agentic frameworks that are portable … and that means that you can have an advice or ecommerce experience on your own website and app, but also within third party platforms like ChatGPT and Gemini”.

Watt conceded the shift carried a “huge” risk of putting more distance into the relationship between the pet care group and its customers.

However, he said it would also allow the company to maintain its brand presence in conversational, AI-driven online search services which are becoming increasingly popular with web users.

“Doing that actually allows you, as a brand, to maintain your brand presence there and protect yourselves from disintermediation,” Watt said.

The shift into third party search environments, while still some time away, will be the next step in the company's digital transformation which, Watt said, has been in progress at the pet care company for the past three-and-a-half years.

In parallel over that time, Greencross has steadily been modernising its digital customer engagement channels, moving from traditional ecommerce catalogue queries to conversational, AI-driven semantic search.

It undertook the groundwork for the shift AI-driven search during development of its Petbarn app which launched late in 2024.

Its strategy was partly driven by the Covid pandemic, which triggered a spike in novice pet owners. Drawing on the group’s veterinary knowledge bases, the company placed a bet on providing a virtual pet care assistant to drive online sales.

However, after analysing queries put to the virtual assistant most frequently, it has since started working on ways to incorporate more agentic AI capability into the app.

Customers, Watt said, are demanding the app attend to tasks handled by traditional customer service channels, such as order tracking and price-matching.

That, he said, has created a case for developing an app with the ability to hand off to agents that can query multiple systems.

“It wasn't enough that the customer could go in and buy things and have advice through the AI. They also wanted to be able to have the post-sales experience fulfilled through the AI as well. That is the challenge that I see for a lot of businesses, and it is for us,” he explained.

Increasingly, Watt said, agentic handoff would help serve the ultimate goal of minimising human involvement in customer transactions.

“If I look at our future vision, it is absolutely bringing those advice, commerce and service experiences together in the same form factor."