At this month’s NRF show in New York, Google Cloud debuted several AI and generative AI-powered technologies to help retailers personalise online shopping, modernise operations and transform in-store technology rollouts.

According to research from Google Cloud, 81 per cent of American retail decision-makers feel urgency to adopt generative AI.

“In only a year, generative AI has morphed from a barely recognised concept to one of the fastest-moving capabilities in all of technology and a critical part of many retailers’ agendas,” said Carrie Tharp, vice president at Google Cloud. “With the ability to accelerate growth, boost efficiency, fuel innovation and reduce toil, generative AI is ready to be deployed now, and Google Cloud’s recent innovations can help retailers recognise value in 2024.”

Google Cloud’s conversational commerce option,announced at the show, can help retailers embed generative AI-powered virtual agents on their web sites and mobile apps. Retailers can build virtual agents that can have helpful and nuanced conversations with shoppers using natural language and can provide product options based on a shopper’s preferences. For example, a virtual agent can converse with a shopper looking for a formal dress for a wedding, and provide personalised product options based on preferred colours, venue type, weather, matching accessories and budget. Critically, retailers can deploy these conversational AI agents in a couple of weeks versus months. This can run on Google Cloud’s Vertex AI (cloud.google.com/vertex-ai) platform, or be embedded into a retailer’s existing catalogue management applications.

Google Cloud also introduced an LLM capability in Vertex AI Search for Retail (cloud.google.com/solutions/retail-product-discover), a product that gives retailers Google-quality search, browse and recommendations natively embedded on their digital storefronts. Qualified retailers can now custom-tune an LLM to their product catalogue and shopper search patterns, which can improve their ability to surface relevant products to queries by better ranking potential products as a fit for any given search term.

For example, a US-based home improvement retailer, whose products are only described in English online, could receive an LLM tuned for home improvement product searches in either English and Spanish, providing more relevant product results to a wider range of consumers.

Google Cloud’s customer service modernisation option,announced at the show, can help retailers improve shopper self-service and engagement. This offering integrates with a retailer’s existing customer relationship management (CRM) system, and with it a retailer can deploy AI-based agents that can help with things such as providing personalised product recommendations, scheduling appointments or checking order statuses. It can also leverage Google Cloud’s AI capabilities for language translation, helping personalise the customer service experience.

In addition, retailers can use it to boost employee productivity with AI-powered summarisations of customer conversations, a single interface to consolidate internal information and real-time responses for representatives based on knowledge across a retailer’s internal resources.

The customer service modernisation option can also help retailers and brands transform their underlying voice and chat technology infrastructures. It lets retailers handle multiple customer engagement channels simultaneously, such as email, text, phone call and online chat, and pivot between these channels during customer service interactions. Retailers can use this technology when combined with Google Cloud’s data warehouse, BigQuery (cloud.google.com/bigquery), to synthesise shopper sentiment across sources such as online reviews, social media posts, customer feedback and chats with customer service representatives.

Google’s catalogue and content enrichment option, also introduced at the show, can help simplify and accelerate product cataloguing, a time-intensive and costly process for many retailers. This includes creating and analysing product images and descriptive text, and then automatically generating content, such as product descriptions, product meta-data, and language tuned for search engine optimisation (SEO). For example, a merchandising team for a sporting goods store can use this to bring their entire product catalogue online automatically for the first time with complete and accurate product descriptions.

As retailers continue to invest in technology, they increasingly need to run software, such as point-of-sale systems as well as new AI and machine-learning capabilities within these systems, with low-latency or intermittent internet connectivity at brick-and-mortar locations. In addition, many retailers want to extend the benefits of cloud-enabled applications into their retail locations at scale with high levels of data security.

Distributed Cloud Edge,Google’s fully-managed hardware and software offering, now has a retailer-focused configuration to help brands deliver modern customer experiences with AI across thousands of locations with low or no internet connectivity. Retailers can save IT resources with three small form-factor servers that are managed by Google Cloud and can be installed in any store. With this product in a store’s back room, retailers can do everything from gathering comprehensive store analytics to streamlining mission-critical store operations.

The technology is also scalable, meaning retailers can keep an eye towards rolling out applications, such as AI-enabled options that power frictionless checkout experiences for shoppers, or provide store associates with visibility into the daily merchandise volume. Furthermore, Google provides, deploys, operates and maintains the hardware, so retailers can focus on serving their customers.

Google Cloud’s three generative AI options for retailers are all cloud-native, service based-AI products, available this quarter. The LLM capability in Vertex AI Search for retail is available to qualified retailers in public preview with general availability coming later this year. Distributed Cloud Edge for retailers will also be generally available in this quarter.