Constructor Unveils Merchant Intelligence Agent (MIA)

Constructor, provider of a search and product discovery platform for e-commerce companies, today unveiled Merchant Intelligence Agent (MIA), an artificial intelligence agent that brings conversational intelligence to ecommerce merchandising teams to better understand and improve how shoppers discover products online.

Teams can ask MIA natural-language questions about how and why products are surfaced in search and discovery across their e-commerce sites and other owned channels, use the agent to investigate campaign performance, ask it for recommendations to accomplish merchandising goals, and much more. In addition, directly within the platform and through an AI-based chat interface, merchandisers can use plain language to pose questions to MIA, such as the following:

• Why isn't this product appearing for an important search query?
• What factors are influencing the ranking of this item?
• How can we improve visibility for this campaign or category?

MIA gives clear explanations and recommendations grounded in each retailer's e-commerce store data, ranking logic and merchandising rules. It is the explainability layer of Constructor's Commerce Reasoning Engine, which processes real-time shopper behavior and context and historical interactions, survey responses, offline signals, merchandising configurations, and more  to determine what to show each shopper and when.

MIA operates across three core functions: explaining product discovery data and results, suggesting next steps, and automating them. Key features include the following:

• AI-generated explanations of search results, product rankings, and merchandising performance, helping teams understand why and where specific items appear (or don't) across queries, categories, and campaigns.
• Actionable recommendations to improve merchandising performance, with suggestions tailored to specific goals. Teams can define what they want to achieve, from increasing product visibility to improving rankings for a key query or campaign, and receive options (e.g., adjust boosts, rules or other strategies) to make it happen.
• AI-assisted campaign creation, with campaign set-up fields pre-filled, so merchandisers can implement suggested changes. At each step, merchandisers can review and edit campaign inputs prior to deployment.
• Executive-ready summaries and reporting, with concise explanations and context around key trends and performance metrics.

"Merchandisers are experts at retail strategy. They shouldn't have to waste their time doing menial investigations that AI can do for them," said Eli Finkelshteyn, CEO and co-founder of Constructor, in a statement. "If a merchandiser has a great idea, we want to let them have AI do the execution. If a merchandiser gets a question about product visibility or campaign performance from their boss, MIA can give them the answer. If a launch happens and something doesn't look right, a merchandiser often doesn't have the time to investigate. They need answers now. MIA is here to help. And as Constructor's dashboard expands with more and more functionality, merchandisers shouldn't have to memorize where everything is. They should just be able to ask MIA."