Google Cloud Brings Powerful GenAI Tools to Retailers
In advance of the upcoming NRF 2024 conference, Google Cloud has unveiled a suite of generative AI (GenAI) solutions that promise to help retailers fuel growth and enhance the customer experience. According to Google Cloud, these GenAI tools will also help retailers personalize online shopping, modernize operations and transform in-store technology rollouts.
“In only a year, generative AI has morphed from a barely recognized concept to one of the fastest-moving capabilities in all of technology and a critical part of many retailers’ agendas,” said Carrie Tharp, VP of strategic industries, Google Cloud. “With the ability to accelerate growth, boost efficiency, fuel innovation, and reduce toil, generative AI solutions are ready to be deployed now, and Google Cloud’s latest innovations will help retailers recognize value in 2024.”
[Read more: "What’s the State of AI Adoption in Retail and CPG?"]
Underpinning the need for such solutions is Google Cloud’s new research on the GenAI outlook in retail, which surveyed nearly 300 U.S. C-suite executives, information technology leaders and business development managers. The company found that 81% of those retail decision makers feel urgency to adopt GenAI in their business, 72% feel ready to deploy GenAI technology today, and 77% anticipate their organizations will start prioritizing hiring for data scientists.
Among the most pressing use cases for GenAI, respondents identified, respectively, customer service automation, marketing support and product description generation, creative assistance, conversational commerce, and store associate knowledge and support.
As for Google Cloud’s new GenAI tools, those include:
Conversational commerce: Enables retailers to easily embed GenAI-powered virtual agents on their websites and mobile apps, allowing them to build virtual agents capable of having helpful and nuanced conversations with shoppers using natural language and providing product options based on a shopper's preferences. Retailers can deploy these advanced conversational AI agents in a matter of weeks.
LLM capability in Vertex AI Search for retail: This product gives retailers Google-quality search, browse and recommendations on their digital storefronts. From today, qualified retailers will be able to custom-tune an LLM to their unique product catalog and shoppers’ search patterns, which will improve their ability to surface relevant products to shopper search queries by better ranking potential products as a fit for any given search term.
Customer service modernization: This solution can help retailers improve shopper self-service and engagement by integrating with a retailer’s existing customer relationship management (CRM) system. With it, a retailer can deploy AI-based agents that are powered by Google Cloud’s Gemini and PaLM 2 family of large language models. These agents can provide personalized product recommendations, schedule appointments, check order status and more.
Catalog and content enrichment: The new solution can help simplify and accelerate product cataloging using Google Cloud’s GenAI technologies, including the Vertex AI next-generation large language model, and text-to-image Imagen model, to create and analyze product images and descriptive text, and automatically generate content including product descriptions, product meta-data, language tuned for search engine optimization and more.
Google Distributed Cloud Edge: The scalable hardware and software offering helps retailers use AI across thousands of locations with low or no internet environments. Retailers can save valuable IT resources with three small form-factor servers that can be installed in nearly any store and managed by Google Cloud. This allows retailers to quickly execute use cases such as store analytics, frictionless checkout and streamlined mission critical store operations.
