Google Cloud took to the stage at the National Retail Foundation’s annual shindig, NRF 2025, today to announce the arrival of multiple new artificial intelligence tools that aim to help retailers enhance their customer’s experiences.

The new innovations include a dedicated version of the Google Agentspace tool for providing knowledge and expertise to employees for the retail industry and new generative AI search experiences that customers can embed directly into their websites and mobile applications.

Google said Agentspace is a one-stop shop that brings together the intelligence of AI agents with its advanced reasoning and search expertise to help employees unlock the secrets within their enterprises’ data and become more productive.

Launched last month, it’s a powerful multimodal tool that’s uniquely able to surface the most relevant data across a retailer’s entire information technology environment, integrating text, images, video and audio to create a more intuitive user experience.

By leveraging the capabilities of AI agents, which are algorithms that can work autonomously without human intervention, Google says Agentspace creates a novel search experience that goes far beyond what was previously possible. For instance, an employee looking for the most up to date information on a product’s benefits can simply ask an AI agent about the latest features using their natural voice, and it will immediately dig up the most relevant info to help customers.

Of course, Agentspace will be useful only if retailers already have plenty of useful data to hand, which is why Google is looking to enrich that too by helping them to create more content about their products. With the new Gen AI Catalog and Content Enrichment tools launched today, retailers now have a way to improve their product catalogs with input from multimodal models like Gemini 1.5 Pro, Gemini 1.5 Flash and Imagen 3. There’s also an AI agent-assisted workflow for merchandise teams that want to add new products to the catalog, making that process easier.

According to Google, retailers will be able to use these tools to “significantly improve” the coverage and accuracy of their product data and, hopefully, improve sales as a result.

For consumers, the search experience is being enhanced with the new Vertex AI Search for Commerce tool, which allows companies to embed generative AI search features into their digital storefronts, making it easier for them to find the products they’re looking for.

New capabilities within Vertex AI Search include a conversational commerce experience that’s said to enable “assisted shopping” on any digital platform. It engages with customers in a more humanlike, conversational way, helping them to find what they’re looking for and answering any questions they may have about the products.

Finally, Google said it also wants to help retailers build what it terms “connected stores” that combine data, insights and AI tools to improve the productivity of their digital sales channels. To that end, it’s bundling a range of different products together, including the Google Distributed Cloud infrastructure service, data tools such as BigQuery, and AI platforms such as Vertex AI.

Moreover, through the new Model Garden, retailers will be able to access over 160 foundational large language models, including Google’s new image-to-video model Geo, to help build those connected stores.

Big retailers get onboard

Google reckons its new AI tools for retailers can be immensely helpful at a time when many are faced with rising costs, supply chain problems, pricing pressures and high employee turnovers. They’re dealing with these issues at a time when consumers increasingly expect to see more personalized, omnichannel shopping experiences, Google said.

It believes AI is the perfect solution to deal with these challenges, and to prove its point, it has already gotten a number of globally recognized brands onboard to showcase the new services announced today.

For instance, Best Buy Co., Inc. is using Google’s Gemini LLM to power a new AI virtual assistant that’s being tested now ahead of a wider rollout planned for this summer. The new bot will help customers to troubleshoot product issues, reschedule deliveries and change their delivery address, manage subscriptions and more. It’s also launching new generative AI tools for its in-store associates, so they can offer a better service to customers.

Meanwhile, Etsy Inc. has used Vertex AI to implement enhanced search recommendations and adverts, allowing it to surface more relevant products that meet its customer’s expectations. And MercadoLibre Inc., the Argentinean e-commerce giant, has used Vertex AI to create a new semantic search experience that improves product discovery and enhances recommendations.

Finally, Google said the fast food chain Wendy’s is pairing Gemini’s conversational capabilities with audio and visual elements to create more personalized experiences for diners in its quick-serve restaurants, freeing up workers to focus on meal preparation and serving customers.

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