Google Cloud has announced a series of new advancements designed to help retailers transform their businesses and deliver exceptional customer experiences powered by AI.
Today, retailers face a complex landscape marked by rising costs, supply chain disruptions, pricing pressures, and high employee turnover. At the same time, consumer expectations for personalized, omnichannel shopping experiences continue to rise. Google Cloud is helping retailers address these challenges with a number of new AI solutions designed to drive business growth and help prepare retailers for the agentic AI era.
“In retail, AI agents are no longer a futuristic concept; they’re the present reality, transforming customer experiences from browsing, to buying, and beyond,” said Carrie Tharp, vice president of Global Solutions & Industries at Google Cloud. “Today, AI agents are not just recommending products, but also curating personalized shopping journeys, handling returns, and providing instant customer service. These AI agents cater to the diverse needs of retailers, from small businesses to global enterprises, and help them drive tangible business value.”
Google Agentspace for Retailers
AI agents are changing the way we work by moving beyond predictive capabilities to performing tasks autonomously. Google Cloud recently launched Google Agentspace as a one-stop shop that brings together AI agents, Gemini’s advanced reasoning, Google-quality search, and enterprise data to unlock enterprise expertise and make employees highly productive. Now available to retailers, this powerful multimodal solution can surface the most relevant data across the retail environment – integrating text, images, video, and audio for an intuitive user experience. For example, a store employee looking for info on the latest product benefits now doesn’t need to search multiple SharePoint catalog pages, and can now ask “what are the latest features?” and find the details immediately to help a customer.
Google Cloud’s retail product portfolio further provides a range of solutions – from integrated assistants like Gemini for Workspace, to platforms like Vertex AI Agent Builder – that help retailers benefit from AI agents. And with NotebookLM for enterprise, also now available for retailers, employees have new ways to engage with enterprise data to work more productively.
Vertex AI Search for Commerce
Search is core to the DNA of Google, and today Google Cloud is launching Vertex AI Search for commerce, enabling retail companies to natively embed gen AI, Google-quality search, browsing, and recommendations into their digital storefronts to dramatically improve users’ ability to surface relevant products for any given search term.
Conversational commerce – a new capability within Vertex AI Search for commerce that also launched today – helps retailers provide assisted shopping on any digital channel to engage with customers in a more natural and human-like conversation This includes helping customers find their desired products online or helping a store associate answer questions using data from multiple sources to increase buying confidence for customers worldwide. In fact, Bed, Bath & Beyond saw a 5% improvement in revenue per visitor (RPV) with Google Cloud’s conversational commerce.
Google Cloud Gen AI Catalog and Content Enrichment
Retailers need accurate and engaging product information to compete for the attention of overwhelmed consumers. Poor product data leads to unhappy customers, bad search results, and fewer sales. The Gen AI Catalog and Content Enrichment solution, launched today, can help retailers improve product catalogs using input from multimodal models (Gemini 1.5 Pro, Gemini 1.5 Flash and Imagen 3), along with a multi-agent agentic workflow that assists merchandising teams with product onboarding.
Retailers and brands can now significantly improve the coverage and accuracy of their product data (attributes, description, copy, and image), leading to richer product information on digital channels and marketing campaigns, enhanced search relevance, personalized experiences and, ultimately, increased sales.
