Disrupting Discovery: Miros AI - Empowering Brands with AI-Driven Visual Search

Heikki Haldre, CEO of Miros AI, talks to Alex Watt, IP & Startup Partner at Howard Kennedy, about his revolutionary AI product, which allows e-commerce sites to improve their search function via an intuitive AI-powered visual and semantic search function.

Here, Heikki Haldre discusses the inspiration behind creating Miros AI, how the company is redefining the customer experience, and what strategic adaptations large retailers need to make to get ahead of the curve.

Heikki, can you tell us about Miros AI and the inspiration behind its creation?

It started with a problem that we wanted to solve. E-commerce is the largest Internet industry by far, GBP 6 trillion this year in terms of value. But the problem it has is that about half of the products that are sold online are highly visual products. When you search for something you want to buy, you are immediately limited by language. It can be difficult to know how to describe a product to get to what you want to buy. 98 percent of visitors to a website leave without buying anything because they give up when they can’t find what they are looking for. If you were able to show them what they wanted, then the industry would grow by another GBP 3 trillion. When you use Miros AI, you are presented with visual search results. You then click on the image that most closely fits what you are searching for. This then brings up more search results. Within just a few clicks, and a few seconds, the AI has taken into account your micro-decisions, and has found what you were searching for.

How is Miros AI helping to redefine operational efficiencies?

Most brands spend between 10-30 percent of their budget on marketing. This is just to get people to their websites. If 98 percent of people then leave without buying anything, because they can’t find what they are looking for, then that budget is immediately wasted. The second highest cost is warehouses and storing the products in stock. If someone spends on average 3 to 4 minutes browsing on a website, they might only see 200 products out of thousands. With Miros AI making their search function more efficient, e-commerce sites are experiencing a higher conversion rate, which means that their marketing expenditure is more efficient, and they can outspend their competitors to ensure a larger market share. We’ve seen sales increasing by 31 percent in some of our retailers using Miros AI so far.

What other trends do you foresee shaping the retail sector in 2025, and how is Miros AI positioned to drive these changes?

Shopping is a bit like finding a needle in a haystack, and the stores with the big haystack where you can actually find the needle are obviously going to outcompete the others, and especially their offline competitors. This year we are actually going to see the next big shift from physical stores to online. Obviously, people are not spending more money, they’re just spending money in different channels, online channels. There will be some product categories that will still be more resilient in physical stores, but think about it, a decade ago, people thought buying clothes online was crazy because they couldn’t try them on.

How does Miros AI differ from other AI solutions in the retail sector?

So every other technology, including Google vector search, is based on using language to search, which is limiting. When you cannot articulate yourself, then it doesn’t matter how good the language model is, it cannot help you if you cannot say what you want.

Can you share some of the exciting developments and next steps for Miros AI that will increase its impact on the retail industry?

Personalisation is going to become important. A retailer might think that they can’t read a customer’s mind, but they would be wrong. Because AI can be built in such a way that it can read people’s minds. The way Miros AI works is a bit like TikTok’s algorithm, it registers your micro-decisions and generates recommendations based on that. So we can observe what products you’re looking for, and if it’s not in stock, we can suggest them to the retailer’s buying department, so that they can make more efficient buying decisions. Fashion is one of the most polluting industries, so wouldn’t it be great if we can start producing more of the products people actually want, and less that they don’t?

And finally, what one piece of advice would you offer founders trying to enter the retail market in 2025?

Focus on e-commerce. It is the largest Internet industry and one of the fastest growing. It’s as if you are a boat in the harbour, and the tidal wave is coming in. The tidal wave takes the boats up. So as a founder, you are allowed to make a lot of mistakes and still succeed, because you’ve chosen the industry which is the biggest and fastest growing.

If you want to find out more about the key trends shaping the retail industry, download the EDGE of retail 2025 report now.