• by Sarah Mahoney , Staff Writer @mahoney_sarah, March 5, 2025

Wayfair’s latest AI experiment, Muse, aims to bridge the gap between inspiration and shopping, offering a more immersive and idea-driven experience. The app builds and expands what the company set out to do with Decorify, launched in mid-2023. Muse uses rich visual imagery for an extended browsing experience. Users can type in a style or vibe they’re curious about, upload a photo, or use a photo of their own space to get hundreds of visual suggestions.

Shrenik Sadalgi, director of research and development at Wayfair, tells Retail Insider where the Boston-based home furnishings company hopes to lead consumers.

Interview has been edited for length and clarity.

Retail Insider: Many AR and AI shopping apps are more frustrating than helpful. You can do photo searches, but typing “navy blue couches” into the search bar would often get you better results. But they are evolving fast, and Muse is far more sophisticated. How did you get here?

Shrenik Sadalgi: Just think of how you shop for furniture. Most online experiences, including Wayfair’s, are transactional. As you said, you could sift through endless pages of navy-blue couches until you find exactly what you're looking for. That’s what we try to do with wayfair.com.

With Muse, we take a step back and think about the idea first, not the products. Do you even know what you're looking for? Is it something abstract in your mind? Is it a specific color or mood? Muse searches start with something unknown -- like any living room ideas -- to abstract, like “beachy.”

Right now, people are likely exploring that online somehow, on Google or Pinterest, for example. We want them to do that in Muse. We want to help people discover what they want and need. You can save these ideas -- we call them muses -- and come back to them. You can add your photos and have Muse apply these looks to your space.

It’s a visual-first, idea-first experience. Products are less critical.

Retail Insider: Wayfair has spent 23 years investing in tech that lets people buy with as few clicks as possible, but I could play with Muse forever. How long do you want customers there before they start shopping in earnest?

Sadalgi: This part of the journey is fulfilling and gratifying. Once you start collecting these muses, how much time you spend exploring doesn’t matter that much to us. Whether you’re buying from Wayfair or not is secondary at this point. An “Explore products” button even takes you to Google.

The point is to tell people, “Wayfair can help you with your idea, no matter how vague.”

Once people begin to shop, we’re pretty confident they’ll find what they want in our extensive collections.

Retail Insider: A fair amount of research shows consumers aren’t as into AI and AR shopping tools as retailers wish they were. And many early tools have been clumsy. How is the industry moving beyond annoying and gimmicky apps to tools people love?

Sadalgi: I love this question. There’s so much noise, and things are developing so fast -- there are tools today that didn’t exist a week ago. There’s no killer app or experience yet. Nobody has figured out what will make us all say, “This is changing the way retail works.”

This is our attempt to do that. We're trying to connect you to something that helps you achieve your desired look.

Our testing shows people don't care that much about seeing products exactly. They just want the combination, the ideas coming together. This is not the moment they say, “I want the orange couch with three tufts.”

We think something here is magical. We will keep scratching at Muse. That’s why this is a pilot and why we keep experimenting. Six months from now, the app will be even better. This version is the worst that it can be.

This is the best time to work in applications, as far as AI is concerned. At the foundation level, all retailer apps are pretty much the same. The differentiators between these companies are figuring out how to use AI in the user experience. We need to help customers understand what the technology can and can’t do -- and how that’s presented will make all the difference.

With Muse, the challenge is to get people to go to the source of truth and characterize what they want from a human point of view. We don’t want them to describe what they’re looking for in words. They may not have the vocabulary for “mid-century modern” or “coastal farmhouse.” We want to help them browse differently so they can narrow searches down, without needing words. And AI can do that quickly and inexpensively, showing images without using traditional photography.

Retail Insider: There are so many tasks generative AI does well, and many creative endeavors where AI fails. It can’t write a very good screenplay, for example, or make original visual art. How does AI do as an interior designer?

Sadalgi: Often, generative AI is generic. We focus on the home and ideas, and we can break design down to fundamentals. Because Muse leads to an unlimited catalog for browsing, people find joy, and their browsing changes and improves the results. The feedback so far is that people find Muse easy and fun.

We think of Muse as a sweet spot between Pinterest, ChatGPT, Houzz and Instagram. People keep thinking of things to Muse on -- show me something with an orange wall, a couch that goes with Southwestern architecture, then show me how it might look in my home.

Retail Insider: How will you measure the success of this test?

Sadalgi: Who’s spending time on Muse, and what are they saving? We’re not watching conversion. People buying stuff is less the point. We're already confident enough in Muse that we're floating parts of what we’re learning into the main Wayfair experience. But there are a lot of different directions we can go, including how we might use Muse in design services.