Mastercard subsidiary Dynamic Yield has announced a generative AI tool that helps consumers search for and discover products in a retailer’s digital catalogue.

Called Shopping Muse, it recreates the in-store human experience by translating consumers’ colloquial language into tailored product recommendations, complete with suggestions for coordinating products and accessories.

Consumers can use it to explore modern aesthetics, trending looks, dress codes and unconventional search terms such as “cottagecore” or “beach formal”. Recommendations match a consumer’s profile, intent and affinity, and build on the conversation’s context over time to deliver results that match even eccentric queries.

Underpinned by Dynamic Yield’s deep personalisation capabilities, it combines contextual and behavioural insights to produce recommendations that are informed by the retailer’s keywords, visual cues and the consumer’s affinity.

“Solutions like Shopping Muse are the next natural step in the retail revolution and are core to putting the consumer back at the centre of the journey,” said Raj Seshadri, president of data and services at Mastercard. “At Mastercard, we’re putting technology and machine learning to work to deliver better outcomes for both brand and consumer.”

In addition to helping shoppers search by phrase, Shopping Muse can reduce frustration by helping consumers find the perfect item even when they don’t know how to describe it properly in words. Using integrated image recognition tools, retailers can recommend relevant products based on visual similarities to others, even if they lack the right technical tags. The tool also takes into account the shopper’s affinity, based on session browsing history or past purchases, to estimate future buying intent. With an understanding of the consumer’s affinity and the context of broader collective behaviour, the retailer can ensure the suggested items are complementary, not redundant.

“Personalisation gives people the shopping experiences they want, and AI-driven innovation is the key to unlocking immersive and tailored online shopping,” said Ori Bauer, CEO of Dynamic Yield. “By harnessing the power of generative AI in Shopping Muse, we’re meeting the consumer’s standards and making shopping smarter and more seamless than ever.”

In this era of fast evolving trends and deep learning algorithms, retailers must adapt to changing demands and higher consumer expectations to move beyond short-term trends. Embracing technology is crucial to that agility; more than one in four retailers are using generative AI, with another 13% planning to adopt it in the next year.

Mastercard acquired Dynamic Yield (www.dynamicyield.com) in 2022 to strengthen its suite of consumer engagement and loyalty services, helping brands deliver more effective and trusted experiences across channels. Mastercard says it embeds privacy safeguards into all of its products and services in line with a Privacy by Design approach and the application of effective and responsible AI principles and standards.