Lucidworks Announces Fusion 4.2 With New Predictive Merchandising Feature for Digital Commerce Customers

By STS News Desk On Mar 28, 2019

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Lucidworks releases updates to Fusion, the AI-powered development platform for search applications, empowering retailers to build a better digital shopping experience

Lucidworks, leader in AI-powered search applications, announces the release of Lucidworks Fusion 4.2, the latest version of their development platform that incorporates machine learning and AI technologies into search applications. The release includes increased usability for product owners and domain experts to easily deploy AI-powered solutions to build a more powerful digital experience for users and increase revenues.

“Retailers are competing to deliver a highly-personalized digital experience to customers, and search is often at the core of the applications and touchpoints businesses share with their users,” says Lucidworks CTO, Grant Ingersoll. “With each release of Fusion, we’re focusing on features and applications that help people find what they’re looking for. Fusion 4.2 empowers brands to learn about their users and deploy updates quickly to production, with access to AI-powered tools that don’t require you to be a data scientist.”

The biggest challenges facing data-driven organizations today is finding an efficient way to import masses of incoming data from users, understanding that information, and then tuning search relevance in real-time to create the best search experience. Fusion 4.2 simplifies this process, most notably for digital commerce customers. The new predictive merchandising feature allows brands to intelligently merchandise their product catalogue using AI to augment their own knowledge. This is powered by components that, for example, allow a merchandiser to come in, execute a search, and see what happens from the customer’s point of view so they can best modify the environment to increase conversions.

The 4.2 release also includes a business rules manager interface that makes it easy to add and modify rules and trigger specific actions as certain search queries come in. An extensive list of frequently used rules is provided, and is also completely customizable so customers can always create new rules. There are also relevance query rewriting algorithms, that rewrite queries that would return zero results so users don’t hit a dead end in their shopping experience. This feature can also automatically tune results based on how many clicks it received, moving better performing products to the top of results returned to the user. Fusion 4.2 also introduces natural language processing capabilities leveraging the popular open source John Snow NLP library as well as deep learning capabilities integrating Google’s popular TensorFlow library.

“Our customers are looking for ways to make life easier for their customers and employees, and the digital experience of search, finding what you need, is at the heart of it,” says Lucidworks CEO, Will Hayes. “With Fusion, customers don’t need to be AI or machine learning experts to get insights from their data. The newest release of Fusion provides even more flexibility, intelligence, and features to help digital commerce organizations deliver a highly personalized experience for customers, and empower employers to provide a digital workplace experience that keeps employees engaged and productive.”