By
Leonardo Palma Batista
Share this post
An interview with nyris’ founder and CEO, Anna Lukasson-Herzig, about the current state of the Visual Search market, the recent increase in usage, and what lies ahead in 2023.
Visual Search, Computer Vision, AI – whether you are in the B2C or the B2B market, or you sell your products online, I am sure you have heard these terms before. The new generation of eCommerce is not only visual with regards to its content and design, but its technology reaches far beyond the touchscreen and into customers’ eyes.
What is your customer seeing? Is it your product, or is it your competitor’s?
Using Visual Search, regular eCommerce sites can leverage the power of AI. Although image search technology is nothing new, it's having a tremendous impact on digital commerce. The winners are companies like Ikea, which have invested in this technology for years and now can reap the early fruits of this upcoming AI revolution.
Today, I interviewed Anna to learn more about the expansion of Visual AI technology.
Why would an eCommerce store add Visual Search as a new feature?
“Adding Visual Search to your e-shop will immediately impact your sales conversion. Just in eCommerce alone, in comparison to text search, we see a 3x conversion rate. And the visual user experience impacts the user so much that our retention levels have doubled in our most successful projects.”
Ms. Lukasson and her brother, Markus Lukasson, founded nyris seven years ago when this type of technology was just beginning to reach the market. For many years, the tech had been reserved for very innovative customers. But as consumer adoption becomes widespread, visual search is increasingly a must for retailers and B2B eCommerce stores.
What is the current state of the market?
“If we look at the Hype Cycle for Artificial Intelligence that Gartner released this year, Computer Vision is rising towards the Slope of Enlightenment. That means that the tech has established itself as a marketable product. We see that shaping up in real-time with visual search and other solutions in the Computer Vision industry. Competition is increasing, but so is opportunity. Companies are beginning to understand that they need an AI strategy, and nyris is at the forefront of consumer Visual-AI applications.”
How significant was the increase in usage in 2022?
“We’ve seen an increase in requests from some of our enterprise eCommerce customers of over 300% in Q3 alone. 50% more requests every month. That’s huge!”
Is there a reason why we see this happening?
“Ever since the COVID-19 pandemic, we are seeing eCommerce operations rise globally. As a result, the advancement in design, technology, and customer experience has increased across the board. So, naturally, since Visual Search is a known technology, our new customers see this adoption as a no-brainer.”
“Visual Search is the next step in the digital transformation of commerce!”
“As the availability of visual search reaches different environments, people become more and more used to the technology. Nowadays, users know how to do an image search from these other experiences, like Google for example. So if you give them this powerful tool, they’ll use it. The tremendous usage increase we’ve seen in 2022 has shown us that, as well as our ROI calculations for enterprise customers.”
What should we expect from this market in 2023?
“As technology becomes more available, users will begin to expect the same standard from all eCommerce. So, we’ll see more traditional players start adopting the tech. We believe that Visual Search will be used at least once by 50% of web consumers within the next two years.
“As we know, consumer products lead the way and B2B follows. And we already have already begun to see B2B eCommerce adopt the technology with much more ease, given that Visual Search has proven itself in the retail market. So, we expect to see not only further growth in retail, B2B but also in non-commercial industrial applications, like service and maintenance, for example. After all, we are in the business of finding anything you see!”
After finishing one of the largest funding rounds in European Computer Vision history, Anna is currently focusing on nyris’ growth. For the reasons we discussed in this interview, due to the increase in demand and regardless of the current crisis, AI is booming. She invites you to check our website– here –and book a demo with one of our amazing representatives– here.
nyris – if you can see it, we can find it!
