Manifest AI News: April'26

Welcome back to Manifest AI - News, your monthly product update.

Big month. Four features that change how buyers shop and how merchants manage AI on their store.

Let’s dive in 👇

Image Input - Shoppers can now show, not just tell.

Manifest AI now accepts images in chat and inside AI Agent workflows. A shopper can upload a photo of a bag and ask "find me something like this" and the Agent will analyse it and suggest matching products. Merchants can toggle image input on or off, and inside Agent blocks, images can be processed and passed forward as URLs to the next step in the flow.

Use cases:

• Fashion stores where buyers want style-matched recommendations
• Skincare brands identifying products from ingredient or packaging photos
• Furniture and home decor where visual matching drives discovery
• Any brand running visual search or style quiz flows in AI Agents

Why it matters:

• Opens an entirely new category of shopping conversations
• Reduces the gap between what a buyer wants and what they can describe
• Lets AI Agents handle visual context and not just text inputs

AI Reviews Agent - Turn your reviews into a sales rep.

Most shoppers read reviews before buying, but digging through 200+ of them kills the moment. The AI Reviews Agent embed surfaces a short summary of what customers say i.e., effectiveness, value for money, fit and it’s right on the product page. Buyers can also ask any question and get answers grounded in real review content. Works with JudgeMe, Yotpo, metafields, and scraped reviews with no extra setup if you're already collecting reviews.

Use cases:

• Skincare and health brands where buyers need ingredient or sensitivity answers
• High-SKU stores where individual product reviews get buried
• Brands with strong review volume but low conversion on PDPs
• Merchants who want to give reviews more impact without changing their review platform

Why it matters:

• Turns existing reviews into a live conversion asset with no extra content work
• Reduces decision fatigue and drop-off at the product page stage
• Builds buyer trust using real customer voices at the right moment
• Works with whatever review platform you're already using

Conversation History & CRM Threads - Your shoppers remember. Now Manifest does too.

When a shopper returns to your store, they now see their past conversations right where they left off which leads to no confusion, no cold starts. On the merchant side, every session from a single customer lives in one continuous thread. Scroll up to go back, no tab-switching, no piecing together context from scattered chats.

Use cases:

• Repeat buyers who ask follow-up questions across visits
• Stores with high-consideration categories where purchase decisions span multiple sessions
• Support teams reviewing customer history before resolving a ticket
• CSMs diagnosing where a customer's journey went wrong

Why it matters:

• Removes the "start over" friction which buyers feel when they return
• Gives your team full context without hunting across multiple threads
• Turns repeat visits into continuations, not cold conversations

Skills-Based Dashboard - Train by goal, not by guesswork.

The Training Dashboard is now Skills. Instead of hunting through pages to figure out what to configure, merchants find everything by what they want AI to do such as Product Guidance, Order Handling, Shipping & Returns, Store & Offers. Each skill has its own Overview (how well it's trained), Knowledge Base (what it's trained on), and Settings (everything else). One place, clear path, no guesswork.

Use cases:

• New merchants who don't know where to start after install
• Teams improving a specific skill without disrupting others
• CSMs helping clients identify exactly which skill needs work
• Merchants tracking AI readiness before going live

Why it matters:

• Merchants stop guessing what to configure and start improving by outcome
• Reduces onboarding drop-off caused by unclear next steps
• CSMs can triage and guide clients faster
• AI readiness score gives a clear north star for improvement

👋 That’s a wrap

You made it to the end - you’re now 5x more AI-savvy than you were 5 minutes ago. Got feedback? Send us an email at support@manifest.ai, we read every single message.