Google Cloud today announced the availability of a number of new artificial intelligence tools, including generative AI systems, designed to help retailers modernize their business operations, better personalize online shopping experiences, and transform in-store technology rollouts.

The new tools were unveiled at NRF 2024, the National Retail Foundation’s annual conference. They’re led by three new generative AI products intended to help retailers make better use of virtual agents, streamline their customer experiences and catalog their products in more efficient ways.

Alongside those tools, Google Cloud also announced a more advanced search technology aimed specifically at retailers, called Vertex AI Search for Retail, which can be customized for each company. In addition, there’s a new hardware and software offering relating to the Google Distributed Cloud Edge service, designed to bring advanced computing capabilities into brick-and-mortar stores.

Virtual agents for customer service

First up are the new generative AI capabilities, which include a conversational commerce offering that makes it easier for retailers to embed powerful AI virtual assistants into their websites and smartphone applications. It allows retailers to quickly create and deploy virtual agents that can hold nuanced conversations with their customers in natural language.

The idea is that the virtual assistants can help to understand the customers’ needs and surface the most appropriate products. For instance, if a customer is looking for a formal dress to attend a wedding, the virtual agent will converse with the customer to find out their ideal color, budget, the matching accessories they have or want and so on.

Google said the advantage for retailers is that they can now deploy these virtual agents within a couple of weeks, whereas in the past it would typically take many months to fine-tune such models.

Enhanced in-store search experiences

There’s also a new large language model-based capability in Vertex AI Search for Retail, which retailers can use to provide a Google-like search experience for customers on their own websites. Google said qualified retailers can now custom-tune an LLM to their unique product catalogs and customer’s search patterns, as a way to improve the quality of their search results.

Customer service modernization

Other new services include a new customer service modernization tool that can help retailers to improve their self-service capabilities and increase customer engagement. According to Google, the new offering integrates with the customer’s existing customer relationship management platform to create virtual agents powered by Gemini Pro and PaLM 2 LLMs. These virtual assistants will then aid in areas such as providing personalized product recommendations, scheduling appointments and checking order statuses.

Google said the new offering can also help companies transform their underlying voice and chat technology infrastructure, giving retailers the ability to handle various engagement channels simultaneously, such as email, online chat, text, phone calls and more, pivoting among them during customer service interactions. Additionally, retailers will be able to leverage Google BigQuery, the cloud-based data warehouse, and various AI algorithms to better understand shopper sentiment across online reviews, social media, customer feedback and customer service chats.

Catalog and content enrichment

Google said its new catalog and content enrichment tools will help retailers to improve their product catalogs. Creating and maintaining a product catalog has always been one of the most time-consuming tasks for any retail outlet, and this is where Google claims to have the biggest impact. It said its new offering makes use of Vertex AI and its most powerful LLMs, such as Gemini Pro, Imagen 2 and PaLM, to create and analyze product images and descriptive text, and then automatically generate new text for product descriptions, product metadata and so on.

Analyst Liz Miller of Constellation Research Inc. said the catalog and content enrichment tools are the most eye-catching of Google Cloud’s new retail offerings, as they eliminate the headaches involved in putting together product descriptions, images and metadata. “The critical thing for retailers here is that these LLM models help analyze and automatically generate content that is tuned for search engine optimization, which is something the world’s top search giant may know something about,” she said.

Retail software at the edge

As retailers adopt more AI-powered tools to modernize their business operations, they have a growing need to be able to run these systems at the edge, where they can benefit from lower-latencies.

To enable this, Google is pitching a new, fully managed hardware and software offering that it says will help retailers to deliver modern customer experiences and AI in thousands of locations, even if they have no internet connectivity. Google Distributed Cloud Edge for Retail provides retailers with a choice of three small form-factor servers that can be installed in almost any store and managed via Google Cloud. By installing these systems on-premises, retailers can perform in-store analytics and deliver frictionless checkout experiences to their customers, Google said.

Miller said  Google’s new tools will help retailers take the next step with their data and AI, and provide more immersive and personalized experiences to their customers. According to her, Google’s tools provide the “key building blocks retailers need to modernize commerce, customer experience and customer service, and apply generative AI in a more meaningful way.”

Google believes there will be a lot of interest in its new offerings, citing internal research that shows how 81% of American retail decision-makers are prioritizing the adoption of generative AI to enhance shopping experiences and streamline their business operations.

Carrie Tharp, vice president of strategic industries at Google Cloud, said generative AI has progressed from a barely recognized concept to one of the fastest-moving capabilities in the technology industry and a must-have for most retailers. “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,” she said.

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