Profitmind, an agentic AI decision intelligence platform built for retail teams, today announced the general availability of Profitmind Awase, a product-matching model that expands competitive intelligence for retailers by identifying the same product across competing online catalogs without relying on a shared barcode or other product code.
Awase analyzes product photography and descriptions together to determine whether two listings represent the same item, including in fashion and other categories where identifiers are unavailable or inconsistent across catalogs. The model has been running in production with Profitmind customers since April 2026. Across that period, fewer than 1% of matches surfaced to retail merchandising teams have been rejected.
“Retailers spend a significant amount of their time trying to understand how they compare to their key competitors,” said Dr. Mark Chrystal, CEO and co-founder of Profitmind. “Merchants often need competitive insights across categories where product identifiers may be missing, inconsistent, or unreliable. Profitmind Awase evaluates the product itself, comparing each product at the detail level of an experienced merchant, so retailers can automate competitive analysis across most of their catalog.”
Why product matching is difficult at scale
Competitive analysis depends on a basic question: does a competitor sell the same product, and where no identical product exists, what is the closest comparable one? In fashion, the answer can be difficult to establish across a large assortment. The same black ribbed midi dress might appear at one retailer as a “sleeveless rib-knit column dress” and at another as a “fitted midi tank dress.” At the same time, two products that look nearly identical may differ in fabrication, fit, season, or another detail that matters commercially.
Retail teams have traditionally reconciled those differences through manual competitive shopping, keyword rules, and product identifiers where available. Those approaches don’t scale across large, frequently changing assortments, particularly when retailers describe and classify comparable products differently.
Profitmind Awase evaluates a product’s image, description and technical specifications together and identifies the corresponding items in competing catalogs without requiring a shared identifier. That matters most in categories such as fashion, where an identical product often does not exist at a competitor at all. A barcode can only ever confirm an exact match, so it cannot answer the comparable product questions merchants actually ask. Awase identifies exact matches where they exist, and the closest comparable product where they do not. Profitmind Awase was built from a corpus of more than 200 million product listings analyzed over the past five years, across every retail segment and product type.
