Meet FoundIt! The platform that took the RTIH Innovation Awards and RTIH AI in Retail Awards by storm

Your search engine isn't broken. Your website isn't obsolete. Your product data is.

Warren Cowan, CEO and Founder at FoundIt!, explains why most large retailers are spending millions treating the symptoms of one root cause - and what fixing it actually looks like.

FoundIt! is an intent led commerce platform built for large, multi-category retailers. We work with brands including M&S, B&Q, Saks, John Lewis, Neiman Marcus, and Michael Kors - and we exist to solve one very specific problem.

Retailers organise their catalogues around attributes, hierarchies, and SKUs. Customers shop around missions, moods, and intent. A customer searching for a "beach wedding guest dress" or "weatherproof garden chairs heavy enough for a balcony" is using language that most product catalogues were never designed to understand.

That gap - between how your site is organised and how your customers think - is what we call the Intent Gap. And it's the root cause of most e-commerce underperformance.

FoundIt! closes it. Our award winning platform learns how customers actually shop, then enriches and curates your product data and on-site journeys to match. No replatforming. No ripping out existing tech. Results in weeks. The outcome: a 4–6% increase in sitewide revenue for the retailers we work with.

RTIH AI in Retail Awards 2026: Overall Winner

"Our award winning platform dissolves discovery chaos to deliver growth in weeks, because it learns how customers want to shop, and enriches and curates data and journeys to inspire and guide them to the right products."

The moment that changed everything

Six months ago, I watched a mate sitting in my car, chatting to ChatGPT about what they wanted to buy. Not typing. Talking. Having a proper conversation. Then they switched to Rufus on Amazon. Then Perplexity. Each one making the shopping experience feel more human.

Then I saw my mate's ten-year-old on Amazon, looking at Lego. His dad asked how many pieces were in the set. The kid didn't look up. "Hold on, Dad. I'll just ask Rufus."

He's ten. He has no context for how things used to work. To him, asking an AI assistant about product details is as natural as asking his dad. That moment crystallised something I'd been seeing across dozens of large retailers for years: the rules of discovery have changed. And most websites haven't.

Every week, something new drops in the e-commerce space. Conversational search. AI generated product questions. Rufus surfacing whether a Warhammer set can be painted, whether a charger works with Apple, and whether garden chairs are heavy enough to survive a storm. Stuff that actually matters to the person shopping right now.

Meanwhile, most retail sites are still operating on the same paradigm we've been stuck in for 20 years. Click on a list. Look at the detail. Come back to the list. Filter. Repeat.

Your customers know what's possible elsewhere. Every time they land on your site, there's a tiny moment where they feel the gap.

The misdiagnosis that's costing you millions

I've watched the same pattern play out across large retailers for the past decade. Search starts underperforming. Zero-result pages creep up. Conversion from search drops. Someone raises a red flag. A tender goes out. Six to twelve months of integration work. Half a million to a million pounds. A new engine gets bolted in.

And for a while, it feels better. Then, two or three years later, the same conversation happens again. I've watched retailers cycle through SOLR, Endeca, Algolia, and on to whatever the next shiny thing is - each time convinced this is the one that finally fixes it. It's not. Because the problem was never the search engine.

Think of your search engine like a brilliant musician. It can only play the notes you've written down for it. If your product data is thin - organised for your catalogue, not your customers - your search engine is working with sheet music full of gaps.

If a customer types "beach wedding guest dress" and you haven't enriched your products with that language, search returns nothing useful. Or worse - a page full of swimwear.

The search engine didn't fail. You gave it the wrong notes to play.

There's a medical analogy I keep coming back to. You wouldn't treat a caffeine headache with stronger painkillers. You'd cut the coffee. Symptom and root cause are two very different things. Retailers have been treating the symptom for years.

Two failures. One root cause

What's important to understand is that there are actually two distinct failure modes playing out simultaneously - and most retailers don't see them as connected.

Discovery failure. Customers can't find you in the first place. They search on Google, through social, through an AI agent - using their own natural language. But your product content is organised in catalogue speak. You're invisible to them.

Experience failure. Customers do reach your site. They search. But search drops them in the middle of a city they don't know, with 2,000 products and no map. They're overwhelmed. They leave.

Two different failures. Same root cause: product content that doesn't reflect how customers think and talk about what they're trying to buy.

And it's compounding. Right now, 50% of your traffic is landing directly on product detail pages. By next year, it'll be more. Google Shopping, Instagram, ChatGPT recommendations, AI agents - they're all sending people straight to the product.

Your homepage is increasingly irrelevant. Your PDP, or as I like to call it, your Product Discovery Page, is the new battleground. And right now, for most retailers, it's a dead end.

Fix the core. Everything else follows

The good news is that solving both failure modes starts in the same place. Fix your product data - not just more attributes, but contextual, intent-based information built around how customers actually shop.

This isn't about bloating your product pages. The enriched data sits quietly, surfacing only when a customer searches for it. You're not changing everything for everyone. You're adding richness that only appears when it's needed.

We did exactly this for B&Q - and they took the intent data we'd generated back into their source systems. It became their data. Their IP. Their asset. They're not dependent on any vendor's black box. They own the intelligence - and it powers their navigation, their search, their SEO, and their AI readiness simultaneously.

That's the smart move right now. Not another platform bet. Not another expensive tender. Building the core that powers everything - whatever the future demands.

We need to stop asking "Is our search engine good enough?" and start asking "Are we giving our search engine what it needs to succeed?" Those two questions lead to very different investments. One costs you six months and a million pounds. The other starts showing results in weeks.

The retailers winning right now aren't the ones with the most sophisticated search technology. They're the ones who understand their customers well enough that any technology they use performs brilliantly.

Want to see what intent led commerce looks like in practice?

Download our award winning B&Q case study here - or get in touch directly at growth@foundit.com for a conversation. We share everything we know, zero held back.

About the author

Warren Cowan has spent 20+ years in e-commerce and founded FoundIt! to help large, multi-category retailers close the gap between how their catalogues are organised and how their customers actually shop. FoundIt! is the RTIH AI in Retail Awards 2026 Overall Winner.