Grosvenor Flooring Named 2026 National AI Awards Finalist

Grosvenor Flooring has been named a finalist in the AI SME Business of the Year category at the 2026 National AI Awards, alongside Available Car, Brdge and Entopy — the only independent flooring retailer in the UK to make the shortlist.

The recognition is for an end-to-end AI transformation of the business, developed in partnership with technology partner Merchi.ai, and entered under the title “Omnichannel AI Revolution: How Grosvenor Flooring & Merchi.ai Digitised Inventory, Automated Sales, and Launched the 24/7 Smart Showroom.” Winners will be announced online on 9 June 2026, with celebrations hosted on 10 June at The AI Summit London, the UK’s premier gathering for AI professionals and innovators.

An independent flooring retailer in a category usually dominated by technology companies

The National AI Awards recognise the individuals, teams and organisations driving meaningful progress in artificial intelligence across the UK, spanning innovation, leadership and real-world application. Past winners include Google DeepMind, Microsoft, Cisco, Darktrace, the Bank of England, Octopus Energy, the University of Cambridge, UCL, Affinity Water and Associated British Ports. The awards are backed by industry bodies including TechUK, UKRI and Plexal.

Being named a finalist places Grosvenor Flooring & Merchi.ai among a select group of organisations recognised for delivering AI in live environments, where performance, accountability and measurable outcomes are under increasing scrutiny.

For an independent Altrincham-based flooring retailer to share a category shortlist with Available Car — one of the UK’s largest used-car retail groups — and two AI-native technology businesses is, in itself, an unusual outcome for the retail flooring sector.

The challenge: a “digital ceiling” common to SMEs

Before this initiative, Grosvenor Flooring faced what the team describe as the classic SME digital ceiling. The company had deep flooring-industry expertise and a vast physical inventory, but its digital operations were manual and unscalable. A backlog of more than 1,000 products sat invisible online because creating unique listings, photography and descriptions for them would have taken years of manual work. Growth was capped by physical showroom hours and a website that functioned more as a static brochure than as an interactive sales tool.

Working with Merchi.ai, Grosvenor Flooring built a holistic, multimodal AI strategy across three operational layers.

Layer 1: Automating operations and content (the “digital shelf”)

The first layer replaced manual data entry with AI agents capable of building a comprehensive product catalogue from raw inventory data. The system processed Grosvenor Flooring’s stock to generate SEO and AEO (Answer Engine Optimisation) optimised descriptions, titles and specifications for over 1,000 Amtico products at scale.

For products that previously displayed generic “Coming Soon” placeholders due to the cost of commissioning lifestyle photography, Generative AI was used to create unique room imagery, allowing the full catalogue to display online for the first time. Across 150+ category pages, AI-written, SEO-rich copy and FAQ content was deployed alongside optimised rich snippets sitewide.

The operational shift was cemented with automated synchronisation jobs that push the optimised inventory to the Google Merchant Centre every morning, ensuring paid advertising and product feeds stay accurate without human intervention.

The productivity gain has been dramatic. Manually listing a product previously took approximately 45 minutes per SKU. Through Merchi.ai’s agentic workflow, that has fallen to around 45 seconds per product — a 60x increase in productivity. The 1,000+ product backlog was cleared at speed, with superior, AEO-optimised attributes and unique lifestyle imagery on every listing.

Layer 2: Revolutionising the customer experience

The second layer focused on the customer journey. Two consumer-facing AI tools sit at the heart of it.

The AI room visualiser, available on every product page across the Grosvenor Flooring website, lets customers upload a photograph of their own room and see any of the company’s flooring products installed digitally in seconds. It bridges the gap between online browsing and the physical reality of a finished floor — replacing the imagination gap that has historically driven returns and decision paralysis in online flooring purchases.

The AI mood-board matcher, available to members of the company’s Grosvenor+ trade and design programme, takes an inspiration image — a magazine clipping, a Pinterest shot, a photograph from a hotel — and autonomously suggests matching flooring options across the company’s full range. It compresses what used to be hours of sample browsing into a single upload.

The customer journey was further streamlined through an automated QR-code sample system: customers ordering samples receive printed stickers carrying QR codes that link directly back to the corresponding product detail page on the website, removing friction from the path between handling a sample and placing the order.

Layer 3: Business model transformation — the 24/7 Smart Showroom

The third layer broke the constraints of “9-to-5” retail entirely. Grosvenor Flooring launched a 24/7 unstaffed Smart Showroom — an access-controlled physical store where customers request a single-use access code through the website and let themselves in via a secure smart-lock system, outside conventional opening hours and without a member of staff present.

To support the round-the-clock proposition, the team built a Gen AI WhatsApp sales assistant that acts as a virtual point of contact, answering customer enquiries and supporting decisions at any time of day. Together, the Smart Showroom and the WhatsApp assistant expanded Grosvenor Flooring’s customer service window from 45 hours per week to a full 168 — a 270% uplift in availability.

The AI ecosystem also extends into how the team builds software. Using AI code editor Cursor, Grosvenor Flooring designed, built and launched the complex Grosvenor+ platform — including loyalty tiers and project-management tools for designers and developers — in just three days. The team describe this as their “speed-to-innovation” capability: pivoting to market opportunities in hours, not months.

Hyper-growth without headcount

The defining commercial signal of the transformation is the way revenue growth has decoupled from operational overhead.

Year-on-year, Grosvenor Flooring delivered a 976% increase in online revenue, contributing to a total revenue uplift of approximately 50% across the business. In a traditional SME context, growth at this magnitude would have demanded significant new hires.

Grosvenor Flooring achieved it with no increase in staff — operating the entire business, including the showroom, online fulfilment and customer service, with just one full-time employee. The AI ecosystem effectively performs the work of in-house digital marketing, data entry, content production and frontline sales teams combined.

The growth has also been delivered with little to no increase in marketing spend. Rather than relying on paid acquisition, expansion has been driven by the organic performance of AI-generated content — demonstrating, in the team’s view, that high-quality SEO-optimised data is a more sustainable growth engine than ad spend for a company of Grosvenor Flooring’s stage.

The Merchi partnership

The technology behind the entire ecosystem was built in partnership with Merchi.ai. Joint entries are unusual at the National AI Awards: most shortlisted businesses enter on their own work alone. The Grosvenor Flooring & Merchi.ai entry was deliberately positioned as a joint build to reflect the reality that mid-sized retailers rarely have the in-house AI capability to develop tooling of this kind — and that the future of AI in retail will, for many businesses, depend on this kind of cross-discipline collaboration.

Founder comment

“We’re a small independent retailer in a category historically defined by Saturday-afternoon showroom visits. The reality is that most of our customers now buy online, and the technology has to meet them where they actually are. Building this AI ecosystem with Merchi was the most direct way we could find to scale the business without scaling the overhead.

“The numbers we’ve seen — 976% online revenue growth with no increase in headcount, a 1,000-product backlog cleared in a fraction of the time it would once have taken, the showroom open round the clock — aren’t the result of any single tool. They’re the result of treating AI as something that runs through the whole business, not just bolted onto a corner of it. Being shortlisted alongside the other finalists is genuinely humbling.”

— Adam Williams, Founder, Grosvenor Flooring

From the National AI Awards

Fergus Bruce, CEO of The National AI Awards, said:

“We are pleased to recognise Grosvenor Flooring & Merchi.ai as a finalist in the National AI Awards 2026. The shortlist of finalists reflects the strength of work happening across the UK to move AI from ambition into practical impact. The diversity of entries and applications of AI have been fascinating and we expect this to only continue into 2027. This year’s finalists represent an impressively high standard of innovation, leadership and execution, and we look forward to announcing the winners and celebrating the overall achievements of the industry in June.”

What happens next

Winners across all National AI Awards categories will be announced online on 9 June 2026, with celebrations hosted on 10 June at The AI Summit London. For more information, visit thenationalaiawards.com.

About Grosvenor Flooring

Grosvenor Flooring is an independent flooring retailer based in Altrincham, Cheshire. Around 85% of the company’s revenue flows through e-commerce, with customers across the UK choosing flooring online before either taking direct delivery or visiting the Altrincham showroom — which is open 24/7 via a secure smart-lock access system. The company sells premium LVT, engineered wood, vinyl and own-brand flooring to homeowners, designers and developers, supported by a multimodal AI ecosystem developed in partnership with Merchi.ai. For more information, visit grosvenor-flooring.com.

About The National AI Awards

The National AI Awards takes place this year as a celebration of excellence and innovation for those who are committed to artificial intelligence. Launched to spotlight the remarkable advances and contributions in the field of artificial intelligence, the awards’ mission is to honour the brilliant minds and innovative companies driving AI technology forward, making a profound impact across private & public sectors. The awards recognise those at the forefront of developing AI technologies and enhancing AI capabilities. For more information, visit thenationalaiawards.com.