Smart digital merchandising entails a data-driven approach that optimizes for business metrics using high-quality data to promote popular items or present the business to customers. A powerful search engine with AI capabilities is essential, but humans still need to play a role in strategic tasks like building campaigns. Control and automation should complement each other, allowing merchandisers to focus on high-level tasks while machines handle order of results. Key tenets of a highly performant solution include being no-code, providing transparency, and enabling understanding of interplay between manual controls and AI optimizations. The new normal for consumer behavior is dynamic and complex, requiring personalized experiences that can be easily enabled by smart digital merchandising solutions.