Wayfair execs tell shareholders of ambitious growth initiatives, AI plans

Wayfair execs tell shareholders of ambitious growth initiatives, AI plans

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BOSTON — Accelerated growth is on the agenda in 2026 at Wayfair after accomplishing its goal of returning to growth in 2025, according to the letter to shareholders delivered by its co-founders.

In their letter, CEO and co-chairman Niraj Shah and co-chairman Steve Conine, noted that despite a choppy macro environment, the company was able to move last year from a 0% growth rate to its latest 7% mark.

“This is just the beginning of what we can accomplish now that Wayfair is returning to full form,” the wrote. “If 2025 was the year we returned to growth, 2026 will be the year of acceleration.”

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The company’s 2026 growth plan falls into three buckets: improving selection, price, availability and speed; inventing and scaling business initiatives that “meaningfully contribute”; and leveraging technology to support operations, suppliers and customer engagement.

Among its business initiatives, which include existing ones such as Wayfair Verified, Wayfair Rewards, its physical stores, the CastleGate logistics operation, its mobile app and Wayfair Professional, is a new delivery program, Wayfair Delivery+. There also will be expansion in helping customers with kitchen and bath renovation projects and improvement in ways for customers to access financing at the purchase and project level.

“We have a lengthy, but not overwhelming, list of growth initiatives and we are excited about how these are progressing,” they wrote. “This focused list allows us to remain very ambitious by parallel pathing numerous efforts, while still ensuring that we will have enough time and resources for each,” they wrote.

The technology-related bucket, “is perhaps the most interesting one,” wrote Shah and Conine. “The age of AI is upon us and the potential utility and benefits from it are larger than we would have thought possible just a couple of years ago.”

On the AI front, Wayfair is currently doing three key things: staff use large language models (LLMs) for chatbot applications on a day-to-day basis; developers use code assistants for routine workflows and the percentage of LLM-assisted or LLM-written code is increasing; and LLMs are used to automate or improve areas such as customer service, product search, product catalogs, advertising and imagery.

Wayfair’s next step involves agentic AI. “We are rapidly moving to the next level of AI adoption,” they wrote, “leveraging agentic systems capable of complex reasoning, chaining actions together and multi-modal understanding.”

The outcome will be to not just automate routine tasks, but more subjective workflows, they said, such as assessing damage based on a photo or curating a design project.

Other uses for AI that Wayfair is working on involve new customer interfaces around design, using its AI Designer and Muse; and reinventing how they work with suppliers and partners—reducing process work for the former and becoming the trusted platform partner across the emerging AI-drive commerce system for the latter.

Recapping their goals, Shah and Conine wrote: “We are firmly in control of our own destiny. We are in a dramatically different position than we were two years ago and the numbers clearly reflect that.

“We are set to not only grow our topline rapidly, but to grow profits even faster. We believe that the combination of free cash flow (growing) and share count (shrinking) are the two best ways to measure the long-term financial success of the business.

“We are in a notoriously cyclical category that has been underspent for years. When it turns, we will benefit from even more upside. For now, we simply focus on accelerating the rate at which we are compounding.”

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Wayfair execs tell shareholders of ambitious growth initiatives, AI plans

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Wayfair execs tell shareholders of ambitious growth initiatives, AI plans

Wayfair execs tell shareholders of ambitious growth initiatives, AI plans
Wayfair execs tell shareholders of ambitious growth initiatives, AI plans
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