NielsenIQ (NIQ) has announced new AI and automation capabilities for NIQ Spaceman, its retail space planning and merchandising platform trusted by more than 600 retailers across 65+ countries.

The enhancements are said to help retailers create store-specific planograms up to 50 times faster, identify execution and compliance gaps, and scale merchandising decisions across their store networks through expanded cloud-based access.

“Retailers are under increasing pressure to localise assortments, execute consistently across stores, and respond more quickly to changing shopper behavior,” said Natalie Williams, SVP, Product at NIQ.

“These enhancements help simplify that process by embedding agentic AI directly into merchandising workflows and automating traditionally manual planning tasks. That means teams can spend less time building and updating planograms and more time acting on opportunities. With greater automation, retailers can improve productivity, respond faster to change, and make more confident merchandising decisions at scale.”

Key benefits

The enhancements are said to offer several client benefits:

• Work more efficiently with NIQ Optiq: Use conversational AI to create and optimise planograms through natural-language requests within Spaceman, reducing manual effort and helping merchandising teams complete traditionally time-intensive planning tasks more efficiently.
• Localise store-specific planograms at scale: Use Spaceman’s automation capabilities to create and maintain store-specific planograms across large store networks, accounting for local market conditions, assortments, and shopper behaviour to bring greater localisation to the shelf at scale.
• Improve execution through AI-powered compliance measurement: Automatically identify execution gaps and compliance issues across stores, reducing manual audits and driving a more consistent shopper experience.

These investments reflect NIQ’s broader commitment to embedding trusted AI across retail workflows and delivering cloud-enabled solutions that help retailers move more seamlessly from planning to execution.

By connecting intelligent automation, merchandising decisions, and execution measurement, NIQ is working to help retailers drive greater efficiency, consistency, and business impact across their operations.