period, and it is looking to launch a merged version of the two platforms sometime in the 2025 calendar year. It is just the latest example of an AI acquisition in recent months – by tech companies in particular. Apple reportedly acquired 32 AI startups last year, and Amazon has invested billions of dollars into AI companies, such as Anthropic and Adept.  In the payments space, Paypal acquired the AI-powered browser extension, Honey, which finds and applies coupon codes at checkout, for US$4 billion in 2020. “Our vision is to be the ultimate shopping companion,” Anthony Seymour-Walsh, CEO of Cashrewards, told Inside Retail. Through the acquisition, the platform plans to eliminate the need for opening multiple tabs when shopping online, which often leads to “confusing yourself with all of the options and different variations”, Walsh said. He said that Little Birdie addresses this issue by leveraging AI and machine-learning models to surface over 70 million products in a standardised fashion with like-for-like comparison across retailers. “It’s a great opportunity for retailers with products on promotion to get in front of consumers,” Walsh said. From the consumer’s perspective, it simplifies the shopping experience from search through to purchase in one virtual destination. What does this mean for retail partners? The merger of Cashrewards and Little Birdie will provide customers with a “holistic shopping journey being a really indispensable tool for them to engage with,” Walsh said. This will in turn give the platform’s retail partners the opportunity to get their products in front of consumers.  Currently, Cashrewards customers are using the platform at a brand and retailer level, but Walsh said, “We know that’s not how customers start their shopping journey”. Eventually, he sees an opportunity to eliminate the physical legwork of comparison shopping offline by integrating the benefits of Cashrewards and Little Birdie into an omnichannel environment. “Today, Cashrewards plays only in the online space, we’ve got ambitions to get back in-store,” he said.  “With the technological capability Little Birdie brings, we see those types of use cases as entirely possible in the future.”  Before a merger can occur, Walsh said that Cashrewards needs to do “a bunch of customer testing, and then we’ve got to really figure out, how do we optimise the experience for our members, for retailers and ensure we’re bringing great propositions [to market]”. “Step two is going to be figuring out the optimal way to integrate those new features that Little Birdie brings with Cashrewards. “We don’t have all of those answers just yet, but we do know that the combination of those features is going to be really valuable in the hands of consumers, from a shopping journey perspective.” Currently, Cashrewards plays at the bottom of the funnel in the customer conversion space. “We’ve got over 2000 brands on the platform. What the Little Birdie capability enables us to do is to be innovative about how we engage with our members further up the funnel,” Walsh said. The great merge While Walsh said he doesn’t know exactly what the merged entity will look like, “there’s a lot of value in the Little Birdie capability and technology that underpins their features,” he said. “We didn’t necessarily invest as heavily in the technology side, we’ve invested more in growing the membership, marketing the brand and our with our relationships with retail partners. “Little Birdie went the other way. They’ve built this fantastic technology capability, and what they identified was as that technology capability was ready to go to market, it was going to be very expensive to continue to add the membership base. “Cashrewards and Little Birdie coming together solves one another’s respective challenges.” Walsh said the majority of the Little Birdie team will be joining Cashrewards. “Little Birdie has incredibly talented people and they’re going to bring some new thinking to us,” he said.