Leveraging AI at Pets at Home
Pets at Home’s experiment using AI to build a fraud detection tool with Microsoft has been so successful that the company is looking at using the technology across many other areas within the organisation.
Speaking at the recent The Retail Bulletin Ecom North 2025 conference in Manchester Simon Ellis (pictured left), head of AI transformation & enterprise architecture at Pets at Home, told a packed room of delegates: “We were seeing more and more fraud and we wanted to bring AI to bear online so the data intensive and manual fraud scenarios could be handled with AI assistance.”
As an early adopter of Microsoft’s Co-pilot autonomous agents Ellis was able to take the heavy workload off his colleagues by using Co-pilot to collate data from various sources – including image analysis – on suspected fraudulent transactions and make quick decisions.
“It’s integrated with the personnel in the fraud department and has allowed decisions to be made in seconds that would have taken 30 minutes. We can identify fraud 10-times faster and the department can process 20-times more cases. It’s a fraud-fighters dream,” he says.
Never Miss a Retail Update!Such an initiative highlights what is possible with AI and is also indicative of a new scenario, according to Olaf Akkerman (pictured right), general manager for retail and consumer goods industry at Microsoft UK, who says: “Technology was the prohibitor but today it is human ingenuity that is holding things back. Companies need to be careful not to rush in but to consider – what is the strategy to [employ to] empower store colleagues? Technology does not determine this, it simply provides the powerful tools to help companies get there.”
Pets at Home considered different technology vendors and Microsoft was an obvious choice because of Pets’ early use of Co-pilot and its existing arrangement with the tech firm’s Azure cloud platform. All it took to build the fraud detection tool was a small team of four that Ellis put together to experiment with AI.
“We had a working prototype built in six days and it was good enough to put into production. Traditionally you would need data scientists and engineers to build it but with AI you can do it using natural language. It’s transformational,” says Ellis.
After this success he says the “opportunities are unlimited and we’ve over 100 use-cased to drive efficiencies through agents”. This includes empowering store colleagues through Co-pilot-powered retail assistants going into stores. Colleagues will have information at their fingertips through a single device into they can ask questions. Pets at Home is investigating providing headsets so colleagues can speak to the system in real-time. “This makes it as seamless as possible for colleagues and is great for them and customers,” says Ellis.
The technology is also being used within the company’s Vet practices: “Applying the AI assistant to listen to vet consultations so it can then draft notes for the file and to be emailed to the pet owners. The vets think it’s a game-changer.”
Such initiatives very effectively “take skilled people away from mundane tasks,” says Akkerman adding that there is so much talk about robots taking over the world with AI but that with any such solutions it is the human capital component that is the biggest asset. Because of this perception and a desire to debunk Ellis says he has repositioned AI as Assistance Intelligence. “It’s not about replacing humans, they are always in the loop. The autonomous agents always go back to their human overlords,” he says.
With the early evidence of great progress at Pets at Home with AI he recommends retailers do not be afraid to experiment with the technology and suggests setting up an innovations team in order that they can leverage the transformational tools now available in what is an “exciting time” for retail.
