All you need to know about Mastercard's Shopping Muse

Mastercard's Shopping Muse is bolstered by advanced personalisation capabilities and is designed to redefine a tailored retail experience
An undated picture illustrating a person holding a Mastercard. — Canva
An undated picture illustrating a person holding a Mastercard. — Canva

Mastercard has launched an AI-powered shopping assistant called Shopping Muse that is set to revolutionise the way consumers search for and discover products in a retailer’s digital catalogue.

Shopping Muse: Next-gen personal retail assistant

Shopping Muse is an advanced generative AI tool that re-creates the in-store, human experience by translating consumers’ colloquial language into tailored product recommendations, complete with suggestions for coordinating products and accessories. It is bolstered by advanced personalisation capabilities and is designed to redefine a tailored retail experience.

How Shopping Muse works

Shopping Muse uses generative AI to revolutionise how consumers search for and discover products in a retailer’s digital catalogue. It translates consumers’ colloquial language into tailored product recommendations, complete with suggestions for coordinating products and accessories.

Consumers can use Shopping Muse to explore modern aesthetics, trending looks, dress codes, and unconventional search terms like ‘cottagecore’ or ‘beach formal’ with ease. Shopping Muse recommendations match an individual consumer’s unique profile, intent, and affinity, and build on the conversation’s context over time to deliver results that perfectly match even the most eccentric query.

Benefits of Shopping Muse

Shopping Muse is designed to put the consumer back at the centre of the journey. It helps shoppers search by phrase and can reduce frustration by helping consumers find the perfect item even when they don’t know how to properly describe it in words.

Using integrated advanced 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 better 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.

Shopping Muse is the next natural step in the retail revolution. By harnessing the power of generative AI, Mastercard is 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 currently using generative AI solutions, with another 13% planning to adopt them in 2024.