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The global artificial intelligence (AI) market in marketing is projected to grow at an annual rate of 29.7 percent between 2021 and 2026, reaching a value of $52.23 billion by 2026, according to forecasts from Mordor Intelligence.
The NRF 2024 fair is about to open and Google Cloud is already warming up the engines presenting innovative AI technologies for the retail sector. The company seeks to lead the transformation wave that is coming, leveraged by generative AI.
In fact, this segment represents a huge opportunity for the adoption of new technologies. According to a Google study, 81% of retail leaders in the US consider it essential to incorporate generative AI urgently.
That is why the search engine firm goes out to the field with solid proposals to enhance differential digital omni-channel experiences. The goal is nothing less than to reinvent retail driven by innovation.
Conversational experiences for a more fluid customer journey
The star of the portfolio is undoubtedly Commerce Conversational, a virtual assistant solution powered by large language models (LLM). This system allows brands to implement highly interactive chatbots in their e-commerce operations in record time.
With only two weeks of deployment, extremely natural and effective bots can be integrated. They maintain dynamic dialogues with users through completely natural language. In this way they deeply understand their preferences and context.
Then, based on different criteria such as available budget, occasion of use, customer favorites, etc. they suggest customized products aligned with those preferences.
For example, the bot can fluidly chat with a woman looking for dresses for a wedding. During the chat she asks relevant data such as her favorite colors, the event’s dress code, the expected weather, accessories to combine, and of course, her price range.
With all that data the assistant recommends ideal dresses, along with shoe, purse or jewelry suggestions to complement according to the customer’s style and budget.
For retailers this represents a huge opportunity to offer hyper-personalized interactive guides that improve the conversion rate. And the best thing is that the implementation is super fast and intuitive.
Vertex AI Search becomes “smarter” in retail
Another great bet to enhance the experience in the digital ecosystem is Retail LLM, an exclusive functionality for retail within the Vertex AI Search platform.
This already powerful tool gains new capabilities specific to deliver more effective searches within online retail product catalogs.
Retailers can implement a custom large language model tailored to the particularities of their inventory and their customers’ search behavior.
In this way, the results shown for each query are significantly more relevant. The model deeply understands the browsing logic within each retail vertical and how users interact.
That’s why it “translates” the keywords typed by shoppers to find the most precise products with each term, regardless of how they search or which language they use.
A clear example is an exclusively English-language digital store selling hardware or DIY items. When faced with queries in Spanish it can still interpret the user’s need and recommend relevant products.
This solution represents a huge leap in improving the search experience within the retail digital ecosystem. And at the same time boosts key business metrics like conversion rates or sales per visit. Another step towards the web 4.0.
Generative AI to optimize internal retail processes
The presented solutions not only aim to improve the front end, but also to solve challenges in internal management where generative AI represents a paradigm shift.
A clear example is Customer Service Modernization, which leverages conversational AI to greatly enhance customer support. Through predictive chatbots, brands can automatically resolve a large portion of incoming inquiries.
But in addition, the solution integrates with the CRM database to understand the customer profile and case history. In this way it can suggest related products or hyper-personalized recommendations.
On the other hand, for human agents it provides real-time automatic translation functions from customer chats. This enables providing support in any language seamlessly.
It also generates a summary of each interaction within seconds so that a record remains and the system can be trained towards the future. This accelerates the constant learning process for the chatbot.
Another solution that impacts efficiency is Catalog & Content Enrichment. This tool leverages generative AI to greatly simplify the entire product cataloging process.
With it retailers can automate the creation of content such as attractive descriptions for each SKU. It also generates SEO friendly text aimed at organic ranking. And most importantly: it can scale to thousands of products.
Thus the online launch of new items becomes a matter of minutes, when traditionally it took many hours or days of manual labor. The savings in resources is exponential.
Cutting-edge technology for brick-and-mortar stores
And the deployment of innovation is not limited to the digital channel. Google brings cutting edge technologies to modernize operations in traditional stores through Distributed Cloud Edge.
It is an integral hardware and software solution that makes it easy to implement AI solutions across thousands of branches. Even for disconnected environments with limited bandwidth.
This gives brands great agility to add apps like real-time metrics analysis by location. Computer vision systems for faster check-out processes. And going forward even deeper automation models based on autonomous computing.
In parallel, the solution drastically reduces IT operating costs and maximizes the security of the company’s sensitive data.
All hardware is delivered as a fully managed service. Companies only need to focus on optimizing the customer experience, while Google Cloud takes care of the rest.
Towards a new AI-empowered retail era
In short, Google Cloud launches compelling solutions to the market to lead the evolution of retail towards a new business paradigm where AI changes everything.
With innovative and rapidly deployable products, it strongly positions itself at the forefront of the race for the industry’s future, increasingly dependent on new technologies.
And for brands to not only effectively but also responsibly adopt AI, the company offers a set of verification tools under the Google Responsible AI program. Thus ensuring that the models function according to reliable ethical standards.
There is no doubt we are witnessing the beginning of a new AI-based era for retail anchored in generative models. An evolution that promises to reinvent everything from internal processes to the way consumers engage with brands.
