Videos
How Puma is Bringing Consumers Closer
Insights
- Technology that brings consumers closer has to co-exist with a brand’s creativity, design DNA, and heritage.
- Consumers already use LLMs to search for products, so the AI worth pursuing is whatever has absolute impact on the consumer experience rather than whatever is hyped.
- Spending less time predicting what technology will look like in five or ten years, and more time making the best of what you have now, keeps teams moving.
At Confluence EMEA 2026 in Geneva, Switzerland, Dr Rui Pedro Silva, Global SVP DTC, CX, Digital Product Engineering at Puma Group describes what drives the brand’s approach to AI: pulling in only what has real impact on the consumer experience. He explains how conversational search and discovery on the brand’s own website are possible now in ways they weren’t two or three years ago, and how Puma balances that with the creativity and heritage behind its designs. He also covers where engineering is scaling across the consumer journey, including product listing and detail pages and product discovery, and where the team takes calculated risks on early moves in agentic checkout. He closes with the personal philosophy behind it: figure it out when you get there, and make the best of what you have today.
Rui Pedro:
I work for the greatest sports brand in the world, Puma. We need to bring consumers closer, and we also have to make sure that we maintain our creativity, our DNA, our heritage with our designs, and they have to co-exist.
If you talk about conversational search within your… conversational discovery within your own dot com, because consumers are used to use LLMs to search for their stuff these days. All of those things are possibilities that two, three years ago were not there. And that's our driver, is like how do we pull things that have absolute impact on consumer experience and not just hyped up.
Infosys with us works a lot on scaling our engineering in areas of our consumer journey. So PLP, PDP is an area where they work. Product discovery is an area where Infosys is working. And then it’s also working with us in spaces where we are trying things out on a risk level like I mentioned about UCP, Gemini, being first or one of the first in Gemini instant checkout, so Infosys is our partner there.
Infosys brings heritage to the table, brings experience of going through, coming from India, where it's gone through a massive, massive revolution when it comes down to technology, engineering, universities, education. That heritage matters to me.
It's my philosophy with life is we're going to get there, and I have this thing that says to myself, ‘We'll figure something out when we get there’. So I don't spend much time thinking about what happens in two, three, five, 10 years technology. I spend more time thinking about what we do, what we have now, and always trying to make the best out of what we have.
