Retail — the question is always where, and there is never anyone to ask

MijA helping a shopper find a store in a shopping centre

In a large store the most common sentence of the day is a version of where is it. The directory board answers it badly, staff on the floor are stocking shelves, and after hours there is nobody at all. MijA answers it properly, in whatever language the shopper opens with, and keeps answering it at two in the morning.

What goes wrong on this floor

  1. A shopper walks the wrong floor for ten minutes because the directory board lists a brand that moved last season.
  2. A tourist wants tax-free processing and cannot find anybody who can explain the paperwork.
  3. An unstaffed store at night has a screen that shows a phone number, and that is the whole customer service offer.

How MijA actually responds

ShopperWhere can I find running shoes?
MijASportswear is on floor three, and there are three shops there that carry running shoes. The largest is at the escalator end. If you are after a particular brand tell me which and I will send you to the right one.
ShopperDo you do tax refunds for visitors?
MijAYes. The tax-free desk is on the first floor next to customer service, open until eight. Bring your passport and the receipts. I am MijA, the AI here, so I cannot process it myself, but the desk staff can do it in a few minutes.

Why this industry needs on-premise

Retail is the sector where in-store analytics has done the most damage to public trust, and shoppers now assume that a screen watching the aisle is recording them. MijA is built the other way round. She sees that a person has approached and turns to face them, and that is the extent of it. The video is processed on the machine in the store and discarded. Nothing about a shopper is stored, profiled or sent out, so there is no shopper dataset to disclose under the CCPA and nothing new to add to a GDPR record of processing.

The store side matters too. Anything that shares a network with a point of sale terminal is a PCI DSS question. MijA does not need to touch the payment network, and does not need an outbound internet connection to work. From 2 August 2026 the EU AI Act requires that shoppers are told when they are speaking to an AI, and MijA opens with that.

How it is deployed

One MijA unit at each main entrance and one at the escalator core on the busiest floor, fed from your own tenant directory so a moved shop is corrected once. Unstaffed night operation runs on the same unit with no change. Convenience formats use a single counter-side unit instead.