From asset search to planograms, AI is making its way into Visual Merchandising. IWD, the Visual Merchandising software provider, is building it into its platform to automate, recommend and improve in-store performance.
McKinsey estimates that merchants could reclaim up to 40% of their time by handing part of their manual, repetitive tasks over to AI agents. It is a broad projection, but it raises a pertinent question for Visual Merchandising: what happens when AI is involved at every stage of the workflow?This is the shift under way at IWD Retail Software, the Visual Merchandising software that helps brands optimise their in-store merchandising performance. For twenty-five years, IWD has partnered with companies such as L'Oréal, The Estée Lauder Companies and LVMH. Its proprietary AI is now being progressively integrated into the platform to automate certain operations, inform decision-making and sharpen the relevance of guidelines before they are rolled out.
The first area of application is the collection. AI will streamline the syncing and import of assets. Then, at the drag-and-drop stage onto virtual shelves, the tool can surface the associated product range.
Finding the right SKU by cross-referencing dimensions, category, price, newness or packaging all at once becomes a query addressed to the tool rather than a manual search. This logic of contextual search and recommendation already lies at the heart of IWD's AI developments. Less time searching, more time deciding.
"Between headquarters strategy and execution, many variables aren't always taken into account: assortments, fixtures, store configurations," notes Alex DeCarolis, Senior Visual Merchandising Specialist at On.
IWD's approach is to resolve these constraints at the design stage rather than leave stores to absorb them. When a planogram is being built, AI will be able to cross-reference multiple criteria, suggest an alternative or flag an underperforming placement. Ultimately, it will be able to propose a tailored guideline based on a brief refined by the teams.
"If field feedback is constantly piling up, it's because the guidelines weren't properly prepared upstream," says Raphaëlle Guigui, COO of IWD Retail Software. The challenge, then, is to move intelligence ahead of rollout rather than fix things after the fact.
As a client put it to Raphaëlle Guigui: "It's not enough for it to look beautiful. It has to sell."
Generative AI can now produce highly convincing images. But an image is not a planogram. A merchandising recommendation must account for the exact assortment, dimensions, available fixtures, merchandising rules and the constraints specific to each point of sale.
That is the difference between an external generative tool and a dedicated business platform. IWD draws on twenty-five years of structured merchandising experience, within an environment subject to strict confidentiality requirements. That business context cannot be recreated with a simple prompt.
Some IWD clients are already testing HD exports featuring strikingly lifelike in-store renderings.
Stock, sell-out, POS and operations are often still managed in separate systems, and brands remain cautious about sharing their commercial data.
Tomorrow, one dedicated agent could flag pressure on a SKU, while another could detect a shift in performance. These signals could then be fed into IWD's VM Suite at the right moment to enrich the recommendation.
Raphaëlle Guigui likes to point out that in a store with four sales associates, Visual Merchandising is the fifth. With AI, the Visual Merchandiser could gain a new teammate.
At IWD, several features are already in beta with clients. The goal remains the one that has guided the platform for more than twenty years: giving teams time, fluidity and peace of mind, by automating what can be automated and bringing more intelligence to the moments when decisions are made.
AI is becoming a genuine teammate for the Visual Merchandiser, able to generate, alert and recommend, so they can focus their expertise where it creates the most value.
An accelerator in service of teams, with an unchanged purpose: Make Stores Perform.