Puma’s Las Vegas pilot signals a broader question for athletic retail: how to deploy AI in physical stores in a way that supplements – rather than supplants – the associate relationships that drive sales and loyalty.
Puma will roll out a multilingual AI assistant at its Las Vegas flagship store this spring, bringing conversational AI onto the shop floor. The system, called the AI Store Concierge, answers product questions, helps with fit queries and checks inventory in real time, while store staff step in for more complex requests.
For Puma, the Las Vegas pilot is a test case. The brand says it will use shopper feedback to decide whether to expand the technology across its direct-to-consumer (DTC) stores and e-commerce.
The concierge appears as a large interactive display that automatically detects a customer’s language and responds in English, Spanish, Mandarin, French or Arabic at launch. It will initially focus on Puma’s performance running range, including footwear built around the brand’s NITRO foam cushioning platform – and includes the ability to confirm whether requested items are currently in stock.
Puma states the system neither tracks nor stores personal customer data. When queries call for a more tailored response, the system is designed to transition conversations to store associates.
“By integrating this technology directly into the store environment, we’re making product exploration faster, more intuitive and more accessible,” said Rui Pedro Silva, Vice President of Direct-to-Consumer Technology at Puma. “With this first example of the AI Concierge, we will gather feedback and explore how to further scale this technology on our DTC channels.”
The concierge was developed in collaboration with LiveX.AI, a US-based AI agent platform, and Google Cloud, and runs on Nvidia’s open-source Nemotron model via Nvidia NIM (Nvidia Inference Microservices) and NeMo microservices. Andrew Sun, Senior Director of Retail Business Development at Nvidia, said the deployment illustrates an operational shift for AI on the store floor: “AI becomes a real partner on the sales floor, helping store teams connect with shoppers, tell better product stories and elevate customer service where it matters most.”
The Las Vegas concierge sits within a broader set of AI commitments Puma has made across its DTC infrastructure. The company has deployed SAP Emarsys – an omnichannel customer engagement platform – to personalize offers and drive early product access across its own and third-party retail channels. Its global e-commerce data and workloads have also been consolidated onto Google Cloud, deepening the technical partnership that underpins the concierge project.
The initiative will feature at Nvidia’s GTC (GPU Technology Conference) in late March 2026. A dedicated session – “Puma’s Smart Stores: Agents and Digital Humans Redefine Customer Interaction” – will bring together Ivan Dashkov, Head of Emerging Marketing Technology at Puma, Jia Li, President and Chief AI Officer of LiveX.AI, Kapil Dabi, Americas Market Lead for Retail and Consumer at Google, and Sun.
