Sections in the article
This month's release brings you some enhancements to efficiency within Syndicate Advance, and more detail on a range of exciting features coming soon to the Inriver PIM. These will empower you to:
- Turn gaps in your product data into trackable, assignable projects
- Onboard data from spec sheets and catalogs direct to your PIM
- Enrich products faster with a conversational AI assistant that knows your data
- Protect downstream channels from draft data with enhanced versioning
- Transform media assets with AI and deliver them with CDN-backed performance
We demonstrated many of these new features in our recent Customer Webinar. If you missed it, you can watch the replay here. The majority of these are available now for early access testing. If you’d like to be among the first to gain early access to any of the functionality described in this article, please register your interest here.
So, let’s dive into the detail of what’s new and coming soon for your business:
From Spotting Content Gaps to Actually Fixing Them
Most teams are good at identifying what's wrong with their product content. The harder problem is coordinating the work to fix it. Issues get flagged, spreadsheets get created, messages get sent, and progress becomes impossible to track. None of that coordination happens inside the PIM, which means it's disconnected from the very data it's supposed to improve.
This month we’re providing early access to new content lifecycle management features that will help you orchestrate and automate your product content operations. We start by introducing three connected capabilities — Health Checks, Signals, and Projects. Together, these give your team a structured way to turn catalog conditions into coordinated action, without leaving Inriver.
Health Checks continuously monitor your catalog against conditions you define. This could be missing descriptions, incomplete retailer attributes, localization gaps, low-quality enrichment, or whatever matters most to your business. When a condition exceeds the threshold you've set, it generates a Signal — a prioritized, actionable opportunity that tells your team what needs attention and why. From there, you can convert signals into Projects, assign ownership, set deadlines, and track progress — all connected back to the underlying data and all done within the PIM. When the gap is resolved, the health check confirms it. The loop closes.
Here's how you create a signal:
And here's how you view the projects associated to signals:
This is the first step of the wider orchestration vision for Inriver — one that will progressively bring more automation and AI-assisted prioritization to content operations. But the value is immediate: your team gets clarity on what to work on, who owns it, and whether it's done.
See signals and projects in action in the customer webinar replay. Register here for Early Access if you’re interested in trying it out.
Turn Unstructured PDFs Into Structured PIM Data — Without the Manual Work
It’s a common pain point for product teams to receive information from suppliers or internal stakeholders in unstructured formats — spec sheets, catalogs, price lists. Before this vital information can be added to the PIM, someone has to open the file, extract the relevant fields, and reformat everything to match your data model. It’s typically a slow, error-prone, and entirely manual process.
We’re introducing a smarter way to handle this challenge. Now you can simply upload your PDF directly into Content Onboarding. The built-in AI extracts the product data from it — identifying fields, pulling values, and mapping them ready for import. If the initial extraction needs refinement, a conversational AI assistant lets you adjust the output without re-running the whole process: just tell it what to change in plain language. Over time, you can build custom extraction prompts for different document types, so the system gets progressively better tuned to your specific suppliers and terminology. You’ll need to license Inriver Inspire to enable onboarding of unstructured data in this way.
Get a demo of this functionality in the customer webinar replay. Register here for Early Access if you’re interested in trying it out.
Enrich Faster With an AI Assistant That Knows Your Data and Speaks Your Language
The AI theme continues as we introduce our latest AI assistant. The Enrich Assistant transforms how you interact with Inspire’s content generation. Now you can automate content generation for multiple fields as part of a single interaction.
Tell the assistant what you need in plain language. It draws on everything it can see about that product — existing field values, images, related assets, and any documents you upload — to generate proposals that fit your data model and terminology. You review what it suggests, select what to keep, and apply it in one click. Or chat to the Assistant to explain what you want to refine and how. No more cutting and pasting data between the PIM and third-party AI tools. You stay in control; your data stays in your governed PIM environment; the assistant handles the time-consuming parts.
As you can see in the image below, the Enrich Assistant appears as a right-hand navigation pane within the regular Enrich page.
Like the unstructured data onboarding functionality described above, Enrich Assistant is only available to customers with Inspire.
See how the assistant works for real-world use cases in customer webinar replay. Register here for Early Access if you’re interested in trying it out.
Enhanced Versioning Keeps Humans in the Loop as AI Takes on More of the Work
As we’ve just seen, tools like the Enrich Assistant make it faster than ever to generate and refine product content with AI. But that raises an important question: once AI is making changes to your product data, how do you make sure nothing reaches your downstream channels before a human has reviewed it?
In an environment where AI is accelerating enrichment, you need to draw clear lines between data that's being worked on and data that's ready to go. With our enhanced versioning capability, it’s easy to draw that line. AI-generated updates, or those made by staff whose work needs approval, stay in draft until an authorized person has reviewed and approved them. You get a visual comparison of exactly what has changed since the last published version, a full version history that you can roll back to if required, and the confidence to experiment with AI-assisted automation without the risk of sending unreviewed content downstream. Stronger governance, full traceability, and a genuine human in the loop.
This will be opening soon for Early Access testing. Register your interest here. Here's a sneak preview of how it will look:
A Smarter, Faster Way to Manage and Deliver Your Media Assets
The final early access feature in this month's release is an overhaul of how media assets are handled inside Inriver — and how they're delivered outside it.
On the inside, we're rebuilding the media experience from the ground up: uploading, previewing, searching, and managing assets will all happen through a modernized interface within the PIM. On the outside, assets will be delivered via a CDN-backed URL — one fast, consistent link per asset that performs reliably across all your sites, marketplaces, and channels. We're also bringing AI-powered image transformation into the mix, including background removal or replacement, image-to-video and adaptations, so you can prepare assets for different channel requirements without leaving Inriver.
This is open for early access testing now. Register your interest here.
Speed Syndication Setup With Lower Admin Overhead
Finally for this month, we have two useful updates to Syndicate Advance that will cut your configuration overhead. Mapping product images, PDFs, and documents to retailer output fields no longer requires custom JavaScript — the new resource picker handles it through simple UI configuration, so your team can set up these mappings without involving a developer. This new feature is available now for all Syndicate Advance customers. Here’s an example of one of the resource picker screens:
We’re also making it easier to quickly adapt to changing format requirements from your retail partners. In the past, changes to data specifications would require you to create a new format version and rebuild your mappings. From later this month, you’ll be able to edit and rename format files directly in the Syndicate Advance UI without impacting your existing mappings. That means less rework, less risk, and faster turnaround when channels change their requirements. Here's how it looks:
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