Google Cloud has announced a series of advancements to help retailers transform their businesses and deliver better customer experiences powered by artificial intelligence (AI).

Retailers face a complex landscape marked by rising costs, supply chain disruptions, pricing pressures and high employee turnover. At the same time, consumer expectations for personalised, omnichannel shopping experiences continue to rise. Google Cloud is helping retailers address these problems with AI offerings designed to drive business growth and help prepare retailers for the agentic AI era.

“In retail, AI agents are no longer a futuristic concept, they’re the present reality, transforming customer experiences from browsing, to buying and beyond,” said Carrie Tharp, vice president at Google Cloud. “Today, AI agents are not just recommending products, but also curating personalised shopping journeys, handling returns and providing instant customer service. These AI agents cater to the diverse needs of retailers, from small businesses to global enterprises, and help them drive tangible business value.”

AI agents are changing the way people work by moving beyond predictive capabilities to performing tasks autonomously. Google Cloud recently launched Google Agentspace (cloud.google.com/blog/products/ai-machine-learning/bringing-ai-agents-to-enterprises-with-google-agentspace) as a one-stop shop that brings together AI agents, Gemini’s reasoning, Google search and enterprise data to unlock enterprise expertise and make employees more productive.

Now available to retailers, this multimodal offering can surface the most relevant data across the retail environment, integrating text, images, video and audio for an intuitive user experience. For example, a store employee looking for information on the latest product benefits now doesn’t need to search multiple SharePoint catalogue pages, and can ask “what are the latest features?” and find the details immediately to help a customer.

Google Cloud’s retail portfolio further provides options from integrated assistants such as Gemini for Workspace, to platforms such as Vertex AI Agent Builder that help retailers benefit from AI agents. And with NotebookLM for enterprise, also now available for retailers, employees have more ways to engage with enterprise data to work more productively.

Search is core to the DNA of Google, and Google Cloud is launching Vertex AI Search for commerce, enabling retailers to embed gen AI, Google search, browsing and recommendations natively into their digital storefronts to improve users’ ability to surface relevant products for any given search term.

Conversational commerce – a capability within Vertex AI Search for commerce – helps retailers provide assisted shopping on any digital channel to engage with customers in a more natural and human-like conversation This includes helping shoppers find their desired products online or helping a store associate answer questions using data from multiple sources to increase buying confidence for customers worldwide. In fact, Bed, Bath & Beyond saw a 5% improvement in revenue per visitor (RPV) with Google Cloud’s conversational commerce.

Retailers need accurate and engaging product information to compete for the attention of overwhelmed consumers. Poor product data lead to unhappy customers, bad search results and fewer sales. The Gen AI Catalog & Content Enrichment offering can help retailers improve product catalogues using input from multimodal models (Gemini 1.5 Pro, Gemini 1.5 Flash and Imagen 3), along with a multi-agent agentic workflow that assists merchandising teams with product onboarding.

Retailers and brands can improve the coverage and accuracy of their product data (attributes, description, copy and image), leading to richer product information on digital channels and marketing campaigns, enhanced search relevance, personalised experiences and, ultimately, increased sales.

Retailers are increasingly looking for the right infrastructure, software and AI to build connected stores that bring together data, insights and AI to improve customer experiences and store productivity. Google Cloud has a range of connected store offerings, from infrastructure products, such as Google Distributed Cloud (cloud.google.com/distributed-cloud), to data products such as BigQuery (cloud.google.com/bigquery), to AI platforms, such as Vertex AI (cloud.google.com/vertex-ai). In addition, through the Model Garden, retailers can now leverage more than 160 foundation AI models, including Veo, Google Cloud’s image-to-video model, and Imagen 3, its text-to-image model. These tools help retail employees instantly access product information for better customer service, and customers can engage with dynamic media on their mobile devices based on their product searches.

• Wayfair (www.wayfair.com) and Google Cloud have expanded their partnership to enhance the online retailer’s product catalogue with Google’s Gemini models on Vertex AI and to improve employee collaboration by deploying Google Workspace to its thousands of employees worldwide. By using Google’s AI technologies, Wayfair has already seen improvements in workforce efficiency and operational cost savings.

• Google Cloud is transforming Dutch fashion retailer Omoda’s online shopping experience with AI. Leveraging Google Cloud’s generative AI tools, Omoda launched Omoda Stylist (www.omoda.nl/aistylist-aistylist.html), a conversational AI agent, and Discover the Look (www.omoda.nl/lookfinder), a feature that reimagines online fashion browsing by helping shoppers find entire outfits rather than individual items. This approach aims to make fashion exploration more inspiring by enabling shoppers to visualise different styling options.