Dick's Sporting Goods Launches In-App AI Coach Built on Adobe Brand Concierge
Dick's Sporting Goods has launched Coach by Dick's, an agentic AI conversational tool embedded in the retailer's mobile app, designed to guide customers across product selection, training advice, and sport-specific recommendations. Built using Adobe Brand Concierge alongside Dick's proprietary content and sport knowledge, the tool adapts to users' stated preferences, goals, and in-app behaviours, positioning it as something closer to a digital store associate than a standard search or filter interface. Through natural conversation, it offers tailored product recommendations, training tips grounded in Dick's sport knowledge, and guidance on fit and gear selection. The rollout begins within the Dick's mobile app in June, with expanded capabilities planned over time. Dick's has not disclosed engagement targets, conversion metrics, or any performance benchmarks for the launch.
Why it matters: The Dick's announcement is notable less for the product itself - which is, at launch, an unproven conversational layer with no reported metrics - and more for what it says about Adobe Brand Concierge as an emerging infrastructure. Several major retailers are now building proprietary AI adviser experiences on top of the same underlying platform, which raises a question about differentiation: if the engine is shared, the moat is entirely in the quality and depth of the proprietary knowledge layer each retailer brings.
For Dick's, that knowledge asset - decades of sport-specific product expertise, athlete data, and in-store guidance - is theoretically defensible. The more interesting test is whether an AI adviser can replicate the conversion rate of a knowledgeable in-store associate!
Rainbow Shops Accused of AI-Cloning a Model's Likeness Without Consent
New York-based model Francheska Pujols sued budget clothing retailer Rainbow Shops on 22 May in the New York State Supreme Court, alleging the company used AI to generate unauthorised images of her after their legitimate contract expired. Under their original September 2024 agreement, Pujols modelled clothing for Rainbow against a plain white background. The complaint alleges the brand then used those source images as inputs to produce entirely new AI-generated scenes - including a hyper-realistic image of her with legs spread over a barstool and another with her reclining while holding a cocktail - that she says damaged her reputation as a high-end model. Pujols dropped the lawsuit a week after filing; her attorney said both parties are pursuing a private resolution. Rainbow has not publicly commented.
Sonya Gugliara
Why it matters: The case lands at an unusually pointed regulatory moment: New York's AI Transparency in Advertising Act, which requires conspicuous disclosure of AI-generated "synthetic performers" in ads, takes effect on 9 June 2026, barely a fortnight after this lawsuit was filed. The New York Fashion Workers Act, already in force, requires express written consent before a model's likeness can be used to create a digital replica; Rainbow's alleged conduct appears to sit squarely in the territory that law was designed to address.
The settlement-before-trial outcome is frustrating from a precedent-setting standpoint, but the underlying behaviour - using a contracted model's likeness as raw material for post-contract AI generation - is almost certainly not unique to one retailer. What this case does is put the fashion industry on notice that the regulatory toolkit now exists, that models and their lawyers know how to use it, and that a shoot-now-ask-never approach to AI image generation carries real legal exposure.
Tilt Raises $26m as Vinted Ventures Bets on Live Commerce
London-based live auction app Tilt has raised $26m in fresh funding, bringing its total capital raised to over $50m, with Vinted Ventures joining the round as a new strategic investor alongside existing backers TQ Ventures, Balderton Capital, Earlybird, and Seedcamp. Founded in 2021 by ex-Revolut employees Abhi Thanendran and Neil Shah, Tilt operates as a live-auction marketplace: buyers select a category, such as womenswear or trading cards, and scroll through livestream auctions in a format similar to TikTok video; sellers go live to showcase products while viewers bid in real time.
The platform uses AI to match buyers to relevant streams and has an AI tool called Snap, which automatically generates product listings - including titles, descriptions, categories, and pricing - from live video in under a second. Tilt's fee structure charges primarily on the buyer side rather than the seller, a model it shares with Vinted. The funding will go towards expanding the AI roadmap, scaling the team, and entering new markets; the platform is currently live in the UK, Italy, Spain, and Poland.
Abhinaya Prabhu
Why it matters: Vinted Ventures' participation is worth flagging: the corporate venture arm of Europe's largest second-hand marketplace frames its mandate as backing "the next generation of re-commerce," and this is its first cheque into a live-commerce platform, which suggests Vinted sees live selling as the next frontier for resale, not merely an adjacent format. The strategic logic goes further than that: Whatnot, the US live-auction giant valued at $11.5bn, is expanding aggressively into Europe, and backing Tilt can be read as a defensive move to keep that expansion from cannibalising Vinted's European resale base. The buyer-pays fee model is a meaningful structural differentiator. It lowers the barrier for sellers to go live without working capital, which is what has generated the kind of indie-seller success stories that drive platform flywheels.
The open question is whether European consumers will actually shift their resale behaviour from asynchronous browsing to scheduled live shopping at the scale live commerce has reached in Asia; Tilt is a credible bet on that transition, but the transition itself remains unproven at scale in Western markets.
