Retailers can now use AI to dream up, assort and price a season’s worth of products in days, but most of the data behind those tools only knows what sold last season. First Insight, the predictive consumer intelligence platform, is adding two new capabilities. The first is an MCP Server that brings the voice of real shoppers into the AI assistants retailers already use, like Claude, ChatGPT and Microsoft Copilot. The second is Storylines, which turns stacks of customer insights across products into a single view that teams can carry into line reviews and leadership meetings.

Together, they help retailers decide which products to back and how to price them as fast as trends now move, before development and inventory dollars are committed.

Retail’s hardest problem isn’t making products. It’s knowing which ones to make.

Most of the tools behind those calls, including many of the AI models now built on top of them, run on historical sales data. That data knows what sold last spring, but it has nothing to say about a new category, a new customer or a trend that didn’t exist a year ago. Guessing wrong is expensive: retailers lose an estimated $1.73 trillion a year to overstocks and out-of-stocks, according to IHL Group.

Imagine a look that takes off on TikTok in March. By the time a traditional product calendar gets it into stores, shoppers may have moved on, and the retailers who bet big on it are left marking it down. Generative AI now lets teams generate product ideas, assortments and price scenarios in a fraction of the time. But it can’t tell them which of those ideas customers will actually buy.

For nearly 20 years, First Insight has answered the question that historical data can’t: what customers will buy next and what they’ll pay for it. Every prediction starts with real shoppers looking at a product and telling First Insight whether they’d buy it and what they’d pay, drawn from a network of more than 360 million consumers in 180 countries. Now, First Insight is building that human feedback right into the AI tools and meetings where retailers make their product and pricing decisions.

How First Insight’s retail AI infrastructure helps retailers bet on the right products:

  • Knowing which products deserve the investment before the money is spent: First Insight’s Value Score™ rating predicts how likely customers are to choose each product it tests, alongside a modeled selling price. Teams can back the likely winners and drop weak ideas before samples, production runs and purchase orders.

  • The human voice inside the AI tools teams already use. With the new First Insight MCP Server, a merchant or analyst can ask its AI tool how shoppers responded to a product. They get back its Value Score rating, modeled selling price and how customers felt about it, right next to the sales and planning data their AI tool already uses.

  • Line reviews built on one story instead of a stack of spreadsheets: The new Storylines tool pulls multiple customer products or insights into a single dashboard, showing how shoppers in different markets responded. This new Storyline view can be shared across teams and exported to editable PowerPoint and Excel files.

“The way merchants and designers work is changing fast, and AI tools are quickly becoming central to how they make product decisions. Teams shouldn’t have to step outside that workflow to find out what customers think,” said Jim Gruskin, CEO of First Insight. “These additions, from Storylines to our API and MCP server, make the customer’s voice available where teams work today and will work tomorrow.”

The First Insight MCP Server and Storylines are available to First Insight customers starting November 1, 2026. To see how First Insight works, visit the link here.

About First Insight

First Insight is a predictive consumer intelligence platform that brands and retailers rely on from product creation to marketing. First Insight combines direct feedback from real consumers with AI and predictive modeling to help them understand what customers are likely to buy, what they’re willing to pay and where to invest. Its proprietary Value Score™ rating measures product appeal, purchase intent and price sensitivity, drawing on a network of more than 360 million consumers across 180 countries. Companies including Under Armour, Boden and Family Dollar use First Insight to guide product, pricing and assortment decisions before development costs and inventory are locked in. First Insight was founded in 2007.

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