Pattern launches Pi AI engine for eCommerce brands

Pattern has launched Pattern Intelligence, or Pi, a new system designed to automate eCommerce tasks for its brand partners.

The product sits at the centre of Pattern's work with brands selling through online marketplaces including Amazon, Walmart, TikTok Shop and eBay.

Pattern describes Pi as an AI-driven execution engine that monitors featured offers, advertising, content, pricing and inventory. When it detects a change or issue, it can trigger an automated response. Decisions that require brand approval are routed to clients as action items.

Every action taken through Pi is logged in an activity centre, creating a searchable record of work carried out on a brand's behalf. The system also includes daily written and audio summaries of recent performance, a chat-based data tool for eCommerce queries, a browser extension that surfaces information on Amazon product pages, and a knowledge management system where brands can upload their own rules and preferences.

The launch reflects a wider push across eCommerce software to move beyond dashboards and analytics toward tools that take direct action. Retail brands and marketplace sellers have increasingly adopted AI-based systems to manage pricing, product listings, advertising and stock decisions as competition intensifies across major third-party platforms.

Pi has been built on more than 13 years of marketplace sales activity and a proprietary dataset of more than 77 trillion data points, according to Pattern. Those records cover pricing decisions, featured offer recoveries, content updates and advertising changes made across its client portfolio, and the dataset is growing by more than 100 billion points each week.

Pattern also says Pi has already taken hundreds of thousands of automated actions across its brand base, including featured offer recoveries, pricing corrections and overnight content changes. That suggests the system is launching not as a pilot, but as a live service already embedded in the company's existing client work.

Operational model

Rather than positioning Pi as a standalone software package, Pattern is presenting it as part of its managed marketplace service. The platform works alongside Pattern's own teams, with automation handling routine interventions and human review reserved for cases where brand judgment is needed.

That hybrid model may appeal to consumer brands seeking more automation in marketplace management without handing complete decision-making to a machine. Many brand owners remain cautious about allowing AI systems to alter pricing, promotional activity or listing content without controls, particularly where retailer relationships and brand presentation are concerned.

Clients can set those controls through a brand-managed library that stores tone, guidelines and preferences. Pattern says this allows Pi's actions to reflect each brand's standards, whether a task is automated or handled with input from its staff.

Pattern has also expanded access beyond the main interface. Alerts and action items can be sent through Slack, Microsoft Teams or email, while a chat application is already available through the ChatGPT app directory.

Competitive pressure

The eCommerce services market has become more crowded as software vendors, agencies and logistics groups seek a larger share of brand spending on digital retail operations. In that environment, proprietary data has become a key selling point, especially for companies arguing that their AI tools can make better decisions than generic models trained on public information.

Pattern makes that argument directly with Pi, saying no generic AI system can reproduce the dataset behind the product because it is built on years of direct marketplace activity carried out for brands.

"Pi is our central execution engine. It doesn't just surface insights, it acts on them," said Dave Wright, co-founder and chief executive of Pattern.

He added: "It's the combination of our AI, a proprietary data set of 77+ trillion data points, and the expertise our team has built over 13 years of selling on these marketplaces. Pi acts on a brand's behalf so our partners and team members can focus on the work that grows revenue and wins market share: going deeper on assortment, evaluating whitespace, and bringing new products to market."

Pattern works with hundreds of brands across more than 70 online marketplaces. Its services span advertising, content management, logistics, fulfilment, pricing, forecasting and customer service, placing Pi within a broader effort to automate more of the routine decisions involved in marketplace trading.

Among the tools now available are Chat-to-Data, which can answer more than 150 built-in eCommerce questions, and Pi Skills, a set of pre-built automations for common workflows. Brand partners can use those features immediately through the Pi platform.

Pi is now available to Pattern's existing brand partners.