Discover how AI creates value at the heart of Mirakl’s products

AI is everywhere. It’s a transformative force across industries, and at Mirakl, we’re fully embracing its potential. Our journey with AI has brought significant changes to our strategy, driving efficiency, optimizing decision-making, and creating new product opportunities. Our exploration of AI didn’t begin with out-of-the box tools, but rather with developing our own proprietary algorithms for over ten years, laying the groundwork for these advancements.

Keep ready to learn more about Mirakl’s vision for AI, how it’s being embedded into our internal processes, and the key ways we leverage AI for and in our products.

1. Our Vision of AI

At Mirakl, we consider AI as a critical enabler of future business growth. AI empowers us to:

• Analyze and enhance both the operational and strategic dimensions of our everyday work.
• Accelerate value creation for our customers by integrating AI into all aspects of our product lifecycle — whether through automating repetitive tasks, improving decision-making, or driving innovation.
• Create additional value in our products by enhancing key features with AI while maintaining the best user experience.

Our approach to AI isn’t about rushing to adopt the latest trends. We believe in progressively integrating AI, steadily building our ‘AI muscle’ while maintaining flexibility and control. A key part of this process is identifying and prioritizing the most relevant use cases, ensuring that our AI efforts are both impactful and aligned with our strategic goals.

2. AI at Mirakl

AI is already deeply embedded in how we work at Mirakl, particularly within our product teams. We’ve deployed various AI applications that streamline operations, increase productivity, and open new doors for growth.

A key principle in our AI journey is distinguishing between “red work” (execution tasks) and “blue work” (deep, strategic thinking). While AI has traditionally been linked to automating red work, it’s also proving valuable in supporting blue work tasks like discovery and strategy formulation. By focusing on both dimensions, we ensure that AI contributes meaningfully across all levels of our processes and tasks.

Illustration 1 — Red work vs Blue work — Image generated by DALL-E

For example:

• Red Work: Custom GPT models help our teams save time on briefing documents, user story creation, and microcopy.
• Blue Work: We’ve leveraged off-the-shelf AI tools, such as Forelight, to accelerate the discovery phase of our product development cycle.

AI is also at the heart of every Mirakl product. One notable success is our Catalog Transformer, which uses generative AI to reshape how our clients manage and optimize their product catalogs. By embedding AI into the product, we enable users to complete tasks like filling in categories and translating and optimizing descriptions for SEO faster and more efficiently. AI not only accelerates processes but also enhances the quality of outputs by identifying insights and patterns that would otherwise go unnoticed adding value to our overall offering.

While the benefits of AI are clear, we recognize the importance of a thoughtful and cautious approach to its implementation. As we incorporate AI into more areas of our products, we continuously monitor and refine AI-driven features to ensure they meet our high standards for quality and user experience.

3. AI for Product Managers

The role of product managers (PMs) is evolving, and AI is playing a central role in that transformation. At Mirakl, we see AI as a powerful ally for product managers, enabling them to work smarter and faster. AI helps PMs automate many of the mundane, repetitive tasks associated with product management, such as data consolidation, writing briefs, and conducting user research. This shift allows PMs to focus more on strategic tasks that require creativity, critical thinking, such as analyzing market trends to inform product decisions, shaping long-term product roadmaps, and exploring innovative features to address market gaps.

For example, we’ve developed an internal GPT tool that enables our product and design teams to efficiently create engaging microcopy. This tool offers smart, context-driven content suggestions that are clear, concise, and tailored to user needs. It has significantly streamlined the process of drafting and refining key interface elements such as button labels, form instructions, and error messages. By ensuring consistency and alignment with the product’s tone, it frees up teams to focus on more strategic, high-impact tasks. The result is a boost in both productivity and user experience, as teams can deliver faster while maintaining high-quality standards.

Illustration 2 — Mirakl Microcopy GPT Agent

AI doesn’t just help with these smaller tasks; it also plays a pivotal role in empowering product managers to focus on critical “blue work,” like discovery and long-term product strategy. AI-driven tools can enhance discovery processes by surfacing insights from data more quickly and accurately than manual methods. This means product managers can make more informed decisions, faster.

A key example of AI empowering our PMs to focus on high-value tasks is during our annual User Advisory Board. By using Forelight to analyze recorded strategic discussions with global customers, we can now generate comprehensive summaries, identify key pain points, and capture new ideas in just minutes. What used to take hours of manual effort can now be done swiftly, freeing our teams to concentrate on understanding the insights and driving product innovation. This efficiency has allowed us to make faster, more informed decisions, ultimately improving the way we respond to customer needs and market shifts.

Illustration 3 — User Advisory Board — Image generated by DALL-E

4. AI in our products

AI existed before Generative AI!

At Mirakl, our AI journey started in 2019 when we developed several proprietary AI algorithms to fuel our products.

Illustration 4 — AI uses cases at Mirakl

From an AI-assisted product approach, where AI is used to augment existing capabilities…

Our initial approach was to improve the user experience within the product with AI-assisted features. Let’s take the example of the Catalog Onboarding User Journey and the “Catalog Auto-mapping” AI feature launched more than 3 years ago.

Illustration 5 — Catalog Auto-Mapping Feature

In this first step, we enabled sellers with an automatic category suggestion feature that complements the existing category selection process to help onboard their catalogs faster. This resulted in a reduction of lead time from weeks to an average of 11 days for sellers to have their products ready to be displayed on an eCommerce website.

…To AI-powered products, creating entirely new AI-driven features

Since Spring 2024, we have launched the Beta version of Mirakl Catalog Transformer, the next stage in accelerating this onboarding process with an AI-powered product approach.

Illustration 6 — AI Powered Product — Mirakl Catalog Transformer

In this approach, we are rethinking the current engineering process for catalog onboarding, with a clear goal of achieving a one-step experience that further reduces lead time from days to hours. To accomplish this, we have built a four-step process: extraction, transformation, enrichment, and rewriting, all natively integrated with a one-step AI solution powered by generative AI.

Illustration 7 — Mirakl Catalog Transformer: One-Step Experience

To Conclude:

At Mirakl, AI is not a distant future — it’s here, actively transforming how we work, create, and deliver value. Whether it’s enhancing the role of product managers, driving innovation within our product teams, or reshaping our approach to product development, AI is central to staying ahead in the fast-paced world of retail and eCommerce. The future of AI at Mirakl is one of continued growth, learning, and innovation, and we’re excited to be on this journey.

Written by Mirakl Labs