What is The Very Group doing with Made With Intent?
The Very Group, which operates digital retailers Very and Littlewoods, has partnered with Made With Intent to move away from static, one-size-fits-all website experiences toward real-time personalization driven by behavioral AI [1]. The agentic decision engine reads more than 800 behavioral signals per session to predict whether a shopper is likely to browse, buy or abandon, then adjusts the experience accordingly [1].
In practice, that means the platform decides, visit by visit, which discount to surface, which payment option to highlight, and when to prompt a hesitant shopper toward checkout [1]. Rather than showing every visitor the same homepage banner or the same generic offer, the system tailors these elements to what it reads as that individual's intent in the moment [3].
The engine can currently activate several types of experience changes:
- Targeted, one-off discounts shown only to shoppers the engine assesses as price-sensitive or close to abandoning [1]
- Personalized payment options surfaced based on a visitor's likely purchase path [1]
- Timed prompts delivered at what the engine identifies as crucial moments in the shopping journey [1]
How the agentic engine decides what each shopper sees
Made With Intent's engine pairs a proprietary prediction model with an optimization AI agent, and together they allocate experiences across hundreds of distinct intent combinations [1]. The system learns which experience works for which type of visitor and context, then carries that learning into future sessions rather than treating each visit as a blank slate [1].
“Our goal has always been to move e-commerce away from generic, static experiences designed for everyone towards something more personalised and real-time.”
That is a deliberate break from legacy personalization, which typically segments shoppers by static attributes like device type or traffic source rather than by what they are actually trying to do in the moment [1].
Early results: a fifth more revenue per customer
In the first month of the partnership, The Very Group says one of its agentic strategies increased revenue per customer by a fifth, alongside a broader uplift in conversion [1][2]. Digital director Sarah Hanna framed the platform as a new operational lever for the e-commerce team rather than a one-off campaign tool [1].
Those figures give the result context: a 20% lift in one strategy, inside one month, against a customer base of 4.2 million active customers [2], is the kind of number that gets a digital team's budget conversation taken seriously at board level.
| Metric | Figure |
|---|---|
| Group annual revenue | ~£2.1 billion [2] |
| Active customers | 4.2 million [2] |
| Very UK share of group revenue | 88% [2] |
| Very UK revenue, FY2024/25 | £1.83 billion [2] |
| Revenue-per-customer lift, one agentic strategy, month one | 20% [1][2] |
Why The Very Group is investing in personalization now
The timing lines up with a change in ownership. Global investment firm Carlyle took control of The Very Group in November 2025, with International Media Investments remaining a key stakeholder, and both parties specifically pointed to greater use of technology and data as a growth driver for the business [2].
The Very Group is not alone in making this bet. Best Buy, Gap and Dick's Sporting Goods all detailed customer-facing AI investments during recent earnings calls [3]. Gap, for instance, rolled out an AI shopping partnership built on Google's Gemini to help customers find the right product and discover new inventory [3].
Bain's research on retail personalization found that top-performing retailers are building tech stacks that synchronize zero-, first- and third-party data into the real-time customer views that power personalization at scale. Bain describes this work as infrastructure-intensive and dependent on accurate, up-to-date data [4].
What it signals for commerce teams evaluating AI personalization
The Very Group's case is notable less for the technology itself than for how quickly it reports results: a double-digit revenue lift from a single strategy inside one month, against an established customer base rather than a greenfield launch [1][2]. That is the bar commerce and digital transformation leaders should hold any personalization vendor to before expanding a pilot into a full rollout.
It also underscores a shift already visible across retail: personalization is moving from scheduled campaigns and static segments toward systems that re-decide the experience every session, pairing a prediction model with an optimization layer that keeps learning [1][4].
For teams running on a unified commerce platform, the practical question is less whether to adopt real-time, intent-based personalization and more how fast their existing data and architecture can support it at the scale The Very Group is now testing.
Sources
- [1]Retail Technology Innovation Hub, The Very Group teams with AI powered e-commerce personalisation firm Made With Intent — retailtechinnovationhub.com
- [2]Retail Gazette, Very ramps up AI personalisation after lifting revenue per customer by 20% — retailgazette.co.uk
- [3]Retail Dive, Retailers turn to AI for productivity, personalized shopping — retaildive.com
- [4]Bain & Company, Personalization: AI for Retail Marketing Magic — bain.com
