At the National Retail Federation’s Big Show (NRF 2025), Google Cloud unveiled a suite of AI-powered tools designed to help retailers meet evolving customer expectations while tackling challenges like rising costs and complex supply chains. "Google Cloud is showing how AI agents and AI-powered search are helping retailers operate more efficiently and create more personalized shopping experiences to meet the demands of the AI era," said Carrie Tharp, Vice President, Global Solutions and Industries, Google Cloud.
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Here's a closer look at some of the key offerings and examples:
GenAI Tools for Retailers:
Google Agentspace
Google Agentspace is a platform enabling retailers to create intelligent AI agents. These AI agents, software systems using AI to pursue goals and complete tasks on behalf of users, are capable of reasoning, planning, and learning. According to Google, these agents can automate operations such as inventory management, customer service, and loss prevention, allowing employees to focus on higher-value work.
"Retailers can now use AI agents to personalise the customer experience by offering tailored product recommendations, answering questions in real-time and guiding shoppers through the buying process," Google said on January 12, 2025.
Vertex AI Search for Commerce
Enhancements to Vertex AI Search now leverage advanced language models, improving product discovery and streamlining shopping experiences.
Connected Stores Solution
This solution bridges the gap between online and physical retail by connecting in-store systems with customer devices, enhancing the omnichannel shopping experience.
Image-to-Video and Image Generation
According to Google, these developments, coupled with Google Cloud's advancements in image-to-video and image generation, provide retailers with tools to improve business operations and deliver exceptional customer experiences.
Retailer Use Cases
Wayfair
The American e-commerce company Wayfair uses Gemini on Vertex AI to improve its product catalog, accelerating launches fivefold through automated product tagging and categorization. According to Google, this not only saves the company hundreds of thousands of dollars annually but also enhances product accuracy and ensures customer satisfaction. Wayfair also uses Gemini to enhance shopping safety by flagging inappropriate content.
Nvidia Partnership: AI Infrastructure
In collaboration with Nvidia, Google Cloud provides retailers with tools and infrastructure to leverage AI at scale. According to Google, companies like LiveX AI and Standard.ai are already benefiting from this partnership.
"Now with Nvidia's AI Enterprise software available on Google Cloud, retailers can handle more data and more complex AI tasks without their systems getting bogged down," Google explained.
According to Google, LiveX AI is building AI agents that reduce customer support costs while providing a more personalised experience. And Standard.ai is helping brick-and-mortar stores understand customer behaviour and improve the in-store experience.
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Everseen: Computer Vision for Retail
Everseen announced it’s working with Google Cloud to bring computer vision to brick-and-mortar retail stores. By using Everseen's Vision AI platform with Google Distributed Cloud and Vertex AI, retailers can process vast amounts of visual data directly in stores, providing instant alerts and real-time insights.
"Imagine AI-powered systems that can automatically detect and prevent theft, optimize inventory management and even enhance the customer experience," Google highlighted.
Partnerships
Google Cloud highlighted partnerships enabling retailers and services providers to build and scale AI solutions. Many of these partners "are deeply engaged with our AI technology to deliver new and novel AI solutions directly to our customers and theirs," Google said.
Google highlighted over 20 ISV and service partners utilizing Vertex AI, Gemini models, and other Google Cloud technologies. Below is the ecosystem of retail partners and how they are using technology from Google Cloud.
Transforming marketing with AI-powered data
"AI is helping retailers get significantly more value from business data, enabling them to create personalized campaigns at scale, increase ROI with data-driven insights, and build more predictive and advanced audience segments," said Paul Tepfenhart, Director, Global Retail Strategy amd Solutions, Google Cloud, Google Cloud.
According to Google, "partners are using Vertex AI, Gemini models, and BigQuery to let customers unlock the true potential of their data."
Eagle Eye delivers its AI-powered omnichannel personalization solution, built on Vertex AI, with built-for-retail algorithms to generate personalized promotions at scale that drive loyalty and customer engagement across channels.
LiveRamp provides a data collaboration platform that allows companies to enrich, activate, and analyze customer data while protecting brand and consumer trust.
Revieve offers multiple solutions tailored for beauty retailers and brands that provide real-time consumer interactions, next gen AI, conversational AI, and data-informed product discovery.
Revionics' price optimization suite utilizes Gemini and Vertex AI to power conversational analytics that enable customers to engage with their retail data using natural language search, such as "which competitor changes prices most frequently" and "which products are priced higher than competitors."
Optimizing unified commerce experiences
Google stated that unified commerce experiences equip retailers with a holistic view of front- and back-end systems to have complete visibility of the customer, inventory, and orders across all retail channels.
BigCommerce uses Google Cloud AI within BigAI Product Recommendations, which enables brands to offer shoppers real-time, personalized recommendations and can boost conversion and average order value, Google explained.
Bloomreach integrates customer and product data within its real-time AI solution, enabling more personalized marketing, product discovery, advertising content, and conversational shopping experiences.
commercetools, a composable commerce company, empowers businesses to customize, scale, and optimize shopping experiences with solutions that help retailers reduce risks and costs, and expand growth through customer experiences.
Everseen Vision AI platform and applications reduce retail shrink, improve inventory accuracy, enhance customer service, and provide data-driven insights, contributing to retailers’ ROI and a streamlined shopping experience.
Quantum Metric provides a digital analytics platform that enables businesses to more easily monitor, troubleshoot, and optimize their customers’ digital journeys while leveraging gen AI to enhance user retention, conversion rates, and more, Google highlighted.
Shopify, a global commerce company, offers a platform engineered for speed, customization, reliability, and security, cater to businesses of all sizes and provide a better experience for consumers everywhere they shop.
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Creating sustainable supply chains
"AI-powered tools for supply chains and logistics are enabling retailers to drive more sustainable and efficient operations, scale automation, and reduce their carbon footprint across the entire value chain," Google said.
345 Global is a cloud-based platform that enables customers to optimize store planning, merchandising, sales, and marketing functions within a single, integrated solution.
Impact Analytics helps retailers and consumer goods businesses make better decisions and improve profitability with a platform that uses predictive analytics and machine learning to optimize various aspects, such as forecasting demand, managing supply chains, and enhancing merchandise planning, pricing, and promotions.
Manhattan empowers retailers to unify point of sale, order management, inventory, fulfillment, and customer service with supply chain execution — optimizing operations, enabling real-time decisions, and driving growth.
o9 Solutions unlocks measurable results by transforming disconnected planning processes, reducing value leakage, and enabling smarter, integrated, and more efficient planning decisions.
Enhancing physical store operations
"Physical stores and in-person shopping experiences remain vital to retailers. AI is helping these businesses improve how they operate in a variety of ways, whether it’s enhancing how merchandising assistants support customer requests or deploying machine vision to detect and resolve low-inventory challenges," explained Google.
NCR Voyix enables retailers to deliver a seamless and personalized omnichannel shopping experience while providing real-time, data-driven insights into shopper behaviour and store performance, which helps optimize operations and supports long-term growth.
Standard.ai offers solutions that let retailers optimize performance through computer vision with capabilities, such as multi-camera tracking to enable a high-resolution understanding of shopper behaviours and store performance.
VusionGroup helps retailers maximize efficiency and improve store performance with solutions that can optimize critical functions, such as intelligent pricing and promotions, real-time shelf monitoring, in-store digital advertising, and more.
Zebra offers new integrated hardware and software solutions that leverage AI and machine learning to help retailers transform workflows through improved inventory, connected frontline workers, and intelligent automation.
Services partners
Google said Google Cloud relies on its services partners to provide customers with the expertise and support needed to plan, deploy, and optimize AI projects. Many of these partners have launched services specifically for retailers.
Accenture and its ai.RETAIL solution provide customers with the technology needed to transform operations, deploying AI and edge computing to improve consumer experiences, personalize marketing, enhance employee productivity, and more.
Deloitte offers a real-time Associate Productivity solution for intelligent task management and improving in-store operations, a Demand Planning solution to enhance inventory productivity and on-shelf availability, and a Customer Data Enrichment solution for better customer insights and personalized marketing.
Publicis Sapient applies Google Cloud AI for its Content Supply Chain offering, which helps businesses optimize the content lifecycle, and its Retail Media Accelerator, which enables retailers to identify new revenue streams and increase ROI throughout the marketing lifecycle.
Tredence brings unified data models and AI/ML accelerators together with its gen AI-powered Category Performance Advisor, which provides real-time prescriptive recommendations for retail organizations to stay ahead of market trends, improve efficiency, and drive measurable growth, Google said on Monday, January 13, 2025.
Slalom provides retail businesses with a multimodal AI discovery solution that uses BigQuery, Vertex AI, and Gemini to help customers solve product discovery challenges and initiate automated workflows for delivery and warranty information.
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Conclusion
Google highlighted that "Generative AI has already had a significant impact on the retail industry by enabling businesses to run more personalized marketing campaigns, increase sales via improved search capabilities, and enhance customer service experiences through more accurate and tailored resolutions. In many cases, AI agents are helping these businesses move beyond predictive capabilities to performing tasks autonomously."
