On the eve of the National Retail Federation’s annual convention, Google Cloud announced a slew of new AI-powered tools for retailers. They are designed to ease the rollout of chatbots and AI, improve search and create more personalized shopping experiences.
There appears to be a significant need for improvement in all these areas. Only about one-third of consumers who have used virtual assistants are satisfied with them and nearly 20% don’t want to use them again, according to a new survey from IBM.
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However, consumers remain very interested in using AI. Most (59%) would like to use AI applications as they shop and 80% of those who haven’t used the technology for shopping would like to try it, according to IBM’s report “Revolutionize retail with AI everywhere: Customers won’t wait.”
Google’s offerings are aimed squarely at these issues. The new tools include:
- Conversational Commerce makes it easier to embed chatbots on websites and mobile apps. They can have “helpful and nuanced” conversations with shoppers looking for products, and make suggestions based on a shopper’s preferences.
- The Complementing Conversational Commerce Solution automatically generates product descriptions, metadata, categorization suggestions and more from as little as a single product photo. It can also generate new product images from existing ones and product descriptions.
- Vertex AI Search adds new large language model (LLM) capabilities, allowing sellers to custom-tune an LLM to their unique product catalog and shoppers’ search patterns. It can provide consumers with more relevant search results by better ranking potential products as a fit for any given search term.
- Customer Service Modernization integrates a retailer’s existing CRM data with chatbots to improve self-service, make product recommendations, schedule appointments, check order status and more.
The company also unveiled Google Distributed Cloud Edge, which is designed to make it easier for retailers to use AI in locations with low or no internet. The current primary use cases for it are store analytics, frictionless checkout and streamlined mission-critical store operations.
Google’s announcement was made the same day Microsoft also introduced AI-powered tools for retailers and two days after Walmart unveiled genAI search technology for consumers to use.
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About the author
Constantine von Hoffman is managing editor of MarTech. A veteran journalist, Con has covered business, finance, marketing and tech for CBSNews.com, Brandweek, CMO, and Inc. He has been city editor of the Boston Herald, news producer at NPR, and has written for Harvard Business Review, Boston Magazine, Sierra, and many other publications. He has also been a professional stand-up comedian, given talks at anime and gaming conventions on everything from My Neighbor Totoro to the history of dice and boardgames, and is author of the magical realist novel John Henry the Revelator. He lives in Boston with his wife, Jennifer, and either too many or too few dogs.
