As the retail industry prepares for the NRF 2024 conference, generative AI is becoming a top priority, and Google aims to play a significant role. Google Cloud has recently announced a range of AI technologies and services specifically designed to enhance the personalized and efficient shopping experiences offered by retailers. These new services build upon Google’s existing generative AI technologies, including Vertex AI, PaLM 2, and Gemini large language models (LLMs), with a focus on meeting the unique needs of retailers.
Conversational Commerce Solution
One of the highlights of Google Cloud’s offerings is the new conversational commerce solution. This innovative solution enables retailers to easily deploy chatbots powered by generative AI on their websites and apps. With these chatbots, retailers can engage in natural conversations with their customers, providing personalized product recommendations based on individual preferences. The conversational commerce solution draws upon Google’s PaLM (Text and Chat) and natural language models (Speech-to-Text and Text-to-Speech) to create engaging and interactive experiences for shoppers.
Enhancements to Vertex AI Search
In addition to the conversational commerce solution, Google has also introduced enhancements to its Vertex AI Search product for retailers. This product aims to improve the quality of search and recommendations provided by retailers. By leveraging Google Cloud’s search and recommendation machine learning (ML) models, retailers can enhance their digital platforms with advanced search capabilities. These capabilities enable a better understanding of user intent and self-learning ranking models, resulting in improved product relevance and increased revenue for retailers.
Furthermore, Google has integrated generative AI into its public search engine with the Search Generative Experience (SGE). However, the retail search upgrade announced at NRF 2024 is a distinct technology developed specifically for retailers’ needs.
“What we’re announcing at NRF is an upgrade to Vertex AI Search for retail. We’ve developed a LLM that can be custom-trained for each retailer to improve product rankings, increasing both product relevance and retailer revenue.” – Amy Eschliman, Managing Director, Cloud Retail Industry Solutions at Google
AI-powered Solutions for Customer Service and Catalog Management
In addition to the conversational commerce solution and enhancements to Vertex AI Search, Google has introduced AI-powered solutions to modernize customer service and catalog management for retailers. The customer service modernization offering integrates with existing customer relationship management (CRM) systems, allowing retailers to deploy chatbots that provide personalized recommendations and schedule appointments. This integration enhances the customer experience and streamlines service interactions.
Similarly, the catalog and content enrichment solution addresses a critical issue for retailers by improving product descriptions. This technology enables merchandising teams to bring their entire product catalog online with accurate and comprehensive descriptions. It reduces errors, such as incorrect product information, and facilitates automatic translation of product copy into different languages. With this solution, retailers can easily onboard new products, update descriptions, and capitalize on emerging trends to enhance the SEO performance and ranking of their website’s organic search results.
“Retailers and consumer-facing brands have already been using several Google Cloud generative AI technologies.” – Amy Eschliman, Managing Director, Cloud Retail Industry Solutions at Google
As part of Google’s NRF 2024 retail push, new research has been released to highlight the demand for generative AI in retail. Based on a survey of 274 executives in the retail industry, the research reveals that 95% of decision-makers expect generative AI to have a significant impact on the retail customer experience. Consequently, 72% of respondents are ready to deploy generative AI technology in 2024. The research also indicates that 59% of retailers intend to use generative AI to improve customer service automation, while 49% recognize its value in marketing support and product description generation.
