Ahead of NRF 2024, the retail industry’s largest event, Google Cloud debuted several new AI and generative AI-powered technologies to help retailers personalize online shopping, modernize operations, and transform in-store technology rollouts.
Retailers today are considering new tools to make their operations more efficient, while also creating more personalized shopping experiences that consumers have come to expect. In fact, 81 percent of American retail decision-makers feel urgency to adopt generative AI, according to new research released today from Google Cloud.
“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, vice president 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 recent innovations can help retailers recognize value in 2024.”
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New generative AI and large language model capabilities to create personalized and helpful online shopping experiences
Google Cloud’s new conversational commerce solution, announced today, can enable retailers to easily embed generative AI-powered virtual agents on their websites 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 personalized product options based on preferred colors, venue type, weather, matching accessories, and budget. Critically, retailers can deploy these advanced conversational AI agents in a couple of weeks versus months. This new solution can run on Google Cloud’s Vertex AI platform, or be embedded into a retailer’s existing catalog management applications.
Google Cloud also introduced today a new LLM capability in Vertex AI Search for retail, a product that 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, which can dramatically improve their ability to surface relevant products to customer queries by better ranking potential products as a fit for any given search term. For example, a U.S.-based home improvement retailer, whose products are only described in English online, could receive a LLM tuned for home improvement product searches in either English and Spanish, providing more relevant product results to a wider range of consumers.
SOURCE: PRNewswire