Williams‑Sonoma reported 6.7% year‑over‑year net revenue growth in fiscal Q2 and pointed to outsized ecommerce gains tied to its AI shopping assistants: the company says revenue associated with Olive rose 620% year‑to‑date while engagement with the assistant climbed 700%.

For the quarter ended Aug. 2, Williams‑Sonoma’s net revenue reached $1.96 billion, up from $1.84 billion a year earlier. Ecommerce comparable revenue increased 6.5%, slightly ahead of the 5.5% growth across the company’s stores, the retailer said on its earnings call.

AI traction that moves the needle

Williams‑Sonoma presented a clear performance gap between shoppers who interact with its AI tools and those who do not. Customers using Olive convert at roughly three times the rate of other shoppers, the company reported. At the same time, a personalized online visit now generates about nine times the revenue of an average visit, up from roughly two times last year.

Building on Olive, the company rolled out Otto across its Pottery Barn portfolio. Early patterns for Otto show more than 70% of engagements resolving without transferring to a human representative. Otto is designed to recommend coordinated items room‑by‑room, advise on rug sizing and materials, book design consultations and hand off complex requests to Pottery Barn designers when necessary.

Williams‑Sonoma said it has expanded Olive’s capabilities this year and that related revenue and engagement increases are “starting to show,” according to the company’s chief technology and digital officer. The company also highlighted that personalization and conversational recommendations are explicitly tied into its free design services and human workflows.

Growth across brands despite industry headwinds

Total comparable brand revenue climbed 6.2% for the quarter, with every major banner contributing: Williams Sonoma led at 7.6% growth, West Elm grew 6.4%, Pottery Barn rose 5.1% and Pottery Barn Kids & Teen increased 3.5%.

Those gains arrived without a housing market recovery and against margin pressure from tariffs. During Q2 the company collected roughly $200 million in refunds and interest on tariffs it had previously paid; after vendor reimbursements and an employee contribution tied to those funds, Williams‑Sonoma reported about a $117 million pretax uplift for the quarter.

Emerging brands and business‑to‑business (B2B) were notable drivers. Williams‑Sonoma said each of its three emerging brands delivered double‑digit comparable growth, and the B2B business—selling furnishings to hotels, airports, multifamily and restaurants—grew 14.5% in its largest quarter by volume to date.

The company ended the quarter with 508 company‑operated stores and raised its fiscal 2026 outlook: it now expects net revenue growth of 4.7% to 7.2% (up from 2.7% to 6.7%) and raised comparable brand revenue guidance to 4% to 6.5%.

What marketers and retail teams should take from this

Williams‑Sonoma’s results offer three practical takeaways for ecommerce and digital teams.

  • Measure attribution and lift tightly. The company attributes large conversion and revenue differentials to AI assistants and personalization. Replicating that requires instrumenting touchpoints so you can attribute revenue to specific conversational flows and personalization variants.
  • Design human‑AI handoffs. High‑complexity purchases still benefit from expert intervention. Otto’s pattern—resolving most routine queries while handing off design work—illustrates a scalable hybrid model: automate discovery and sizing, reserve humans for high‑value interactions.
  • Prioritize personalization that ties to economics. Williams‑Sonoma’s move from 2x to 9x revenue per personalized visit suggests personalization can substantially increase monetization, but teams should optimize for lifetime value and margin, not single‑visit spikes alone.

Beyond the storefront, Williams‑Sonoma is applying AI across supply chain, inventory, merchandising and corporate functions—an important reminder that measurable ROI can come from operational as well as customer‑facing use cases.

What to watch next

Key questions remain as Otto scales across Pottery Barn: will the company sustain the same engagement and conversion rates at higher scale, and how consistently can it attribute uplift when AI tools are rolled into more touchpoints? For retailers planning similar investments, the immediate priorities are reliable instrumentation, controlled experiments, and playbooks for human‑AI collaboration that protect margins and lifetime value.

Williams‑Sonoma’s results show that well‑implemented AI features can be more than a customer‑experience novelty—they can materially change ecommerce economics when tied to measurement and operational discipline.