Search and computing powerhouse Google this week released three new generative artificial intelligence (AI)-based tools to help retailers balance their twin goals of fueling growth and improving the customer experience.
Introduced at the National Retail Federation (NRF)’s annual trade show in New York, the technologies can help retailers personalize online shopping, modernize operations, and transform in-store technology rollouts, Google said.
In pursuit of trying to balance making their operations more efficient, while also creating more personalized shopping experiences, 81% of American retail decision-makers feel urgency to adopt generative AI, according to research from Google Cloud.
In response, Google Cloud said it is now providing:
- A generative AI-powered “conversational commerce solution” that enables retailers to easily deploy personalized chatbots for online shopping, that function as virtual agents on their websites and mobile apps
- A “customer service modernization solution” that creates personalized and streamlined experiences by integrating with a retailer's existing customer relationship management (CRM) system to engage shoppers with personalized product recommendations, scheduling appointments, or checking order statuses
- A “catalog and content enrichment solution” that helps retailers accelerate the cumbersome product cataloging process by analyzing product images and descriptive text, and then automatically generating content
In other AI advancements for retailers, Google Cloud said it also introduced a new large language model (LLM) capability in its Vertex AI Search for retail platform. This product gives retailers Google-quality search, browse, and recommendations natively embedded on their digital storefronts. Qualified retailers will now be able to custom-tune a LLM to their unique product catalog and shopper search patterns, dramatically improving their ability to surface relevant products to customer queries.
And the company said that its managed hardware and software offering called Google Distributed Cloud Edge now has a retailer-focused configuration. That platform helps brands deliver modern customer experiences by installing small form-factor servers managed by Google to support AI across thousands of locations with low or no internet connectivity.
