Google Cloud rolls out a slew of AI products for retailers

Google Cloud has rolled out a slew of new and updated artificial intelligence (AI) solutions designed to help retailers improve in-store shelf checking processes and e-commerce capabilities. The new solutions are being announced ahead of the National Retail Federation (NRF) 2023 conference one of the retail industry’s largest events that gets underway in New York on January 15, 2023.  

The company said that its new AI-based shelf checking solution is built on Google Cloud’s Vertex AI Vision, an AI platform that analyses and stores video data. That said, the solution will utilise Google’s database of facts about people, places and things, and allows retailers to solve challenges like, how to identify products of all types, based on the visual and text features of a product, and then translate that data into actionable insights.  

The company said that while retailers have tried different shelf-checking technologies for years, their effectiveness has often been limited by the resources needed to create reliable AI models to detect and differentiate products—from the different flavors of jam and jelly, to the dozens of types of toothbrushes. 

Besides, retailers will have a high degree of flexibility in the types of imagery they can supply to the shelf checking AI. For example, a retailer can use imagery from a ceiling-mounted camera, an associate’s mobile phone, or a store-roaming robot on shelf-checking duty, Google said in a statement.  

The vendor’s shelf checking AI tool is now in preview globally, and is expected to be available to retailers globally in the coming months, the company said, without mentioning any specific date.  

Google Cloud has also announced an update to its Discovery AI solutions for retailers to offer a more personalised experiences to shoppers. The new capability uses machine learning to select the optimal ordering of products on a retailer’s ecommerce site once shoppers choose a category, like “women’s jackets” or “kitchenware.” 

The company has further announced new upgrades to its Recommendations AI solution that uses machine learning to help retailers bring product recommendations to their shoppers. The new page-level optimization feature now enables an ecommerce site to understand what product recommendation panels to “uniquely” show to a shopper and in turn help retail firms improve conversion rates.

“Upheavals over the last few years have reshaped the retail landscape and the tools retailers need to be more efficient, more compelling to their customers, and less exposed to future shocks,” said Carrie Tharp, VP of Retail and Consumer, Google Cloud, adding that some of the most pressing in-store and online challenges can be solved with the newest technology tools, such as artificial intelligence and machine learning. 

Not only Google, its rival Nvidia has also come up with a series of new retail AI workflows targeting the retail segment ahead of NEF 2023 event. The company with the help of AI technology is looking to help retailers solve the issue of shrinkage, a term that is used to describe inventory and revenue losses due to misplaced and damaged products, as well as losses due to fraud and theft. The new workflows are built with the Nvidia Metropolis Microservices framework for building AI applications, it said. 

According to a September 2022 study by U.S-based research firm Grandview Research, the AI in retail market size was valued at $5.79 billion in 2021 globally and is expected to expand at a compound annual growth rate (CAGR) exceeding 23.9% from 2022 to 2030. Retailers are increasingly using AI for personalized and improved customer engagement, inventory management, supply chain management, programmatic advertising, smart recommendations, and chatbots, among others, it said.