We're finalists at the National AI Awards 2026, and this one means a lot
We found out today that Grosvenor Flooring and merchi.ai have been named finalists for AI SME Business of the Year at the National AI Awards 2026.
Honestly, it’s a bit surreal. This started as a real project with a real business trying to solve a real problem, not a case study, not a pitch deck. So seeing it recognised at a national level feels genuinely special, and I wanted to write about what we actually built, because the story is worth telling properly.
The problem Adam had
Adam runs Grosvenor Flooring, a specialist flooring retailer with deep product knowledge, a physical showroom, and a loyal customer base. What he didn’t have was a digital operation that matched any of that.
The most immediate problem: over 1,000 products that were effectively invisible online. Not because they weren’t good products, but because getting them listed properly (unique descriptions, accurate specs, lifestyle photography, SEO) would take a person the best part of a year to do manually.
Beyond the catalogue backlog, the showroom closed at 5pm. Weekend enquiries went unanswered. Customers trying to imagine what a particular flooring would look like in their own home had to rely entirely on their imagination, which, for a high-consideration purchase like flooring, is a surprisingly big barrier to actually buying.
Adam’s situation isn’t unusual. It’s exactly the ceiling that a lot of good SMEs hit: real expertise, real product, but without the infrastructure to scale it digitally.
What we built
We approached the project in three parts.
Getting 1,000+ products online, properly
The first job was clearing the catalogue backlog. We processed the raw Amtico inventory through merchi.ai and generated SEO-optimised titles, descriptions, and specifications for every product, each one unique, each one accurate. At the same time, we used generative AI to create lifestyle imagery for products that had nothing but a placeholder.
What had previously taken around 45 minutes per product was reduced to 45 seconds. The entire backlog was cleared in hours rather than months.
We also wrote unique, fact-rich content for over 150 category pages, and set up automated daily syncs to push the inventory to Google Merchant Centre, so ads and listings stay accurate without anyone having to manually update them.
Making the website actually help people buy
Flooring is a genuinely hard thing to buy online. You can’t feel the texture, and imagining how it’ll look in your home is difficult. We built a Gen AI Room Visualiser directly into the Grosvenor Flooring website: customers upload a photo of their own room and see the flooring installed in it, in seconds.
We also rethought the sample journey. When a customer orders a sample, it now triggers an automated print job that produces a QR sticker linking straight back to that product’s page on the site. So the path from “I like this sample” to “I want to buy it” became frictionless, with no hunting for the product again or losing the thread.
Opening the showroom 24/7
The third part was the most ambitious. We launched a Smart Showroom, an access-controlled system that lets customers visit the physical store unstaffed, at any time of day or night. No appointment, no waiting for opening hours.
To support this, we built a Gen AI WhatsApp bot that acts as a virtual sales assistant around the clock. This isn’t a FAQ bot; A customer can message at 11pm on a Sunday, ask for a deal on 50 square metres of luxury vinyl, and the bot will check stock, and process the order. Completely autonomously.
The showroom went from being open 45 hours a week to 168 hours a week, a 270% increase in availability, with no extra staff.
What happened
- 976% increase in online revenue year-on-year
- ~50% total revenue uplift across the business
- All achieved with no increase in headcount, the business runs with a single full-time employee
That last point is the one I keep coming back to. This wasn’t done by hiring a digital marketing team or a content agency. It was done by building the right infrastructure and letting it run.
Adam has also since launched Grosvenor+, a proposition platform for fitters and interior designers, with loyalty tiers, project lists, and VAT-free pricing. It was designed, built, and shipped in 3 days. The momentum is real.
Why this nomination matters to us
The category is AI SME Business of the Year, and I think that framing is exactly right for what Grosvenor Flooring represents. A lot of AI coverage is about enterprise: large companies running large pilots with large budgets. What this project shows is what happens when a small business gets proper access to these tools and uses them with genuine intent.
One person. A physical showroom in the UK. A genuinely great product. And now, a genuinely world-class digital operation that runs while he sleeps.
Congratulations to Adam and the whole Grosvenor Flooring team: this recognition is entirely yours. We’re proud to have played a part.
We’ll share more when we know the outcome. In the meantime, you can find out more about the National AI Awards 2026 and the other finalists on their website.
merchi.ai helps retailers turn product images into publish-ready content at scale. If you’re facing a similar challenge to what Grosvenor Flooring had, we’d love to talk.