What we know about Best Buy’s next CEO Jason Bonfig

Under Bonfig’s leadership, Best Buy moved into the e-commerce era. His background with the retailer suggests that he’ll continue bringing Best Buy further into new lines of business or emerging technologies — from advertising and the marketplace to AI — with a continued focus on the core retail business.

He presided over merchandising as it brought in new categories in 2022 to drive growth post-pandemic, including fitness, furniture, electric bikes and beauty gadgets, according to CNBC. Bonfig also testified before federal officials in 2019 on the impact of tariffs on consumer electronics.

“It’s not surprising that a chief merchant … assumes the mantle as CEO; he’s been there a long time,” said Andrew Lipsman, a retail media analyst for Media, Ads + Commerce. The incoming Best Buy CEO also marks the latest in a recent string of internal retail CEO promotions, such as at Walmart and Target.

Joe Feldman, senior managing director of Telsey Advisory Group, wrote in a research note that Bonfig’s leadership roles across most areas of the company, as well as his knowledge of the culture. make him a logical choice to lead the company. “He knows and understands the culture,” Feldman wrote. “His promotion sends a positive signal to all Best Buy employees that they can rise through the ranks.”

Feldman said he doesn’t expect many changes to the company’s strategy, given his long history with the retailer.

“We continue to believe Best Buy executes well and is maintaining/gaining market share in the consumer electronics space, based on its ability to introduce newness, leverage its scale and vendor relationships, manage costs, and operate efficiently,” Feldman wrote. “Looking ahead, newer initiatives, such as higher-margin marketplace and advertising, and ongoing product innovation and the replacement cycle, should help drive profitable growth.”

Bonfig will be tasked with growing marketplace, advertising businesses

The marketplace and advertising are two key growth areas of the business moving forward. Recent moves under Bonfig’s leadership hint at how he believes these different lines of business may live together.

At the end of 2024, the company brought in Disney advertising executive Lisa Valentino to lead Best Buy Ads. Last fall, the division began pushing in-store takeover packages, believing they could help tell a “sequential story as consumers come into the store,” Valentino told Modern Retail at the time.

Last year, Best Buy launched its new third-party marketplace, with more than double the number of products available on its website. At launch, the company said more than 500 online vendors would join the marketplace. “When you look at areas of growth and areas the company is willing and wanting to invest in based on the upside potential, marketplace is one of those areas,” Best Buy chief marketplace and e-commerce officer told Modern Retail in 2025.

“As Best Buy’s growth increasingly ties itself to Best Buy Ads and marketplace, those areas will pose new challenges,” a former Best Buy employee told Modern Retail on condition of anonymity. “I’ll be interested to see how someone with a traditional merchant background approaches [them] since they can sometimes run directly into vendor relationships.“

Lipsman said there’s often tension between retail media and merchants, because merchants worry about giving visibility to brands that advertise rather than to those most relevant to customers. But he said Best Buy has long had alignment between media and merchandising, including at the C-suite level. Just last year, Barry said Best Buy is “becoming both a retailer and a media company,” saying it can tap into its base of 200 million customers, 60 million of whom shop annually.

The tension between media executives and merchants “is resolvable because both actually have the same interest at the end of the day, which is to increase sales,” Lipsman said. “The media business only wins more dollars from advertisers if they can prove that it’s driving incremental sales for the brands.”

Another new CEO with eyes toward AI

Like the other retail CEOs entering the mix this year, Bonfig will be the Best Buy CEO responsible for bringing the company into the era of AI.

Best Buy announced in 2024 that it would use AI internally, partner with Google Cloud and Accenture to build new tools making recommendations to customer support employees, and build out customer-facing assistants on the web, phone and the Best Buy mobile app.

Barry, the outgoing CEO, said that AI’s transformation of the consumer electronics world, in conjunction with improving customer and employee metrics, makes this a good moment for a transition at Best Buy.

She told CNBC she expects AI to change the way people work and shop, but she also expects it to change what the products themselves look like. Some smartphones and laptops are already being marketed with AI-centric features, such as Microsoft’s Copilot+ line of PCs. “It’s important for someone to steer that next horizon,” she told the outlet.

According to Bonfig, AI “is going to drive a generation that wants to use it in many different ways,” he told the Minnesota Star Tribune. “You’re going to see it come across a lot of different products — so there’s a growth cycle associated with it.”

Bonfig told CNBC that AI will open up new categories and features, such as Ray-Ban Meta glasses that didn’t exist before. “You’ll see us continue to make sure we’re as quick as possible to bring those in front of our customers, both digitally and in our stores,” he said.

At the same time, Best Buy is also focused on its physical footprint and is set to increase store count for the first time in more than a decade.

“Stores are a critical part of our strategy,” Bonfig told the Star Tribune. “They put us closer to the customer, and our customers use them in a lot of different ways.”