Yes. iA provides answers based exclusively on articles written by the Retail Week’s experienced business journalists and other expert authors. It does not at any point access external data, which could be unreliable, inaccurate or under copyright.

Retail Week has tested iA extensively to train the model, so we know it provides reliable, useful information. We’ve also made sure that iA does not try to fill in any ‘gaps’ in our knowledge data or interpret someone’s opinion as fact.

If iA is unable to answer your question, it will tell you so.

Although iA is based on a GenAI platform, it works in a different way to ChatGPT, Google Gemini and other large language models (LLMs). While they gather information from all over the web, iA only has access to the high-quality, factual content published by Retail Week.

Created by Miso.ai, it responds to questions informally, with a brief, summarised answer and clickable links that can be followed for more in-depth information.

Short for Generative AI, GenAI is a type of machine learning tool that can look at existing content and use it to generate entirely new output. It can respond to prompts such as questions or instructions to create new text, images, video and audio almost instantly.

No. iA – or any other form of generative AI – is never used for the creation of our editorial articles. Our experienced journalists and guest authors write independent news, analysis and reports you can trust.

Learn more about Retail Week’s AI policy.

The questions asked via iA will be recorded and stored to help us understand what our readers are interested in and how we can improve our digital coverage.

We also collect anonymised user data that allows us to better understand the interests and intent of readers. That is to say that the data we and Miso.ai capture does not allow us or them to identify any specific user of Retail Week accessing this tool, or their interaction with the tool.

Learn more about Retail Week’s privacy policy and  Miso.ai’s privacy policy .

There are concerns around the sustainability of GenAI, with a typical Chat GPT search using more energy than a Google search. Because iA only accesses Retail Week content rather than the open web, its energy consumption is significantly less.

The iA model is also built on open-source foundation model, which means there are none of the heavy energy costs incurred by training it from scratch.

Our partner Miso.ai uses AWS as its primary cloud provider. Learn more about sustainability and renewable-based cloud infrastructure at AWS .