Ross Williams is the founder and CEO of merchi.ai, an AI-powered retail merchandising platform that helps retailers generate high-quality product content at scale. He started merchi.ai after spending over a decade working inside some of the UK's largest retail and technology organisations, where he saw first-hand how poor product data costs retailers revenue and wastes team time.
Background
Ross's career spans both the retailer and vendor sides of the industry. He held roles at Tesco and N Brown Group on the retail side, and at SAP and Emarsys on the technology side, giving him an unusually broad view of how product data, content, and personalisation actually work (and fail) in practice.
Author
Ross is the author of Human Possibilities in the Age of AI, a book exploring how individuals and organisations can thrive alongside artificial intelligence rather than being displaced by it. Available in hardback, paperback, and Kindle on Amazon.
Open Standards
Ross is the originator of the AI Provenance Protocol, an open, vendor-neutral standard for machine-readable provenance of AI-generated content. The protocol gives organisations a structured way to record where AI-generated content came from, which model produced it, and under what conditions — directly relevant to Article 50 compliance under the EU AI Act. It is maintained as an open-source project and is free for any organisation to adopt.
Recognition
merchi.ai was named a finalist at the National AI Awards 2026 in the AI SME Business of the Year category, recognising the company's work applying large language models to real retail product data problems.
Writing
On this blog, Ross writes about building merchi.ai in public, the realities of deploying AI in production retail environments, and where product content and search are heading. The "Building merchi.ai" series documents the technical and strategic decisions behind the platform from day one.