Google Cloud has presented three technologies developed from artificial intelligence at the largest retail event in the US, the NRF 2023 fair. These tools are intended to help retailers in their work, such as with the Inventory.

Despite the uncertainty, the retail industry has a tremendous opportunity. The leaders of tomorrow will be those who address today's most pressing challenges in the store and online channel with the newest technology tools, such as artificial intelligence and machine learning," said Carrie Tharp, vice president of Retail and Consumer Affairs at Google Cloud.

Autonomous learning for more personalized navigation and search results
Research commissioned by Google Cloud found that 75% of shoppers prefer brands that personalize interactions and reach them, and 86% want a brand that understands their interests and preferences.

To help retailers create more seamless and intuitive online shopping experiences, the company has introduced a new tool to personalize a retailer's web search results through AI. AI recognizes product search patterns through a customer's behavior on an e-commerce site, such as their clicks, cart, purchases, and other information, to determine shopper taste and preferences. The AI ​​then moves the products that match those preferences up the search and browsing rankings for a personalized result.

A shopper's personalized search and browse results are based solely on their interactions with that specific retailer's e-commerce site and are not linked to their Google Account activity. The buyer is identified through an account that he has created on the retailer's site or through a first-party cookie on the website.

A new design for websites thanks to AI
Discovery AI for retailers is one of the solutions that the company has presented at the NRF fair. Consumers spend more and more time browsing the web to find products or get inspired.

Google Cloud wanted to launch a solution that helps retailers make the online browsing and product discovery experience more modern, fast, intuitive, and satisfying for shoppers. The Discovery AI solution for retailers will use machine learning to select the optimal order for products on a retailer's e-commerce site once shoppers choose a category, such as "women's jackets" or "kitchenware." Over time, the AI ​​learns the ideal product order for each page on a website using historical data, optimizing how and which products are displayed for accuracy, relevance, and likelihood of making a sale.

Historically, e-commerce sites have sorted product results based on category best-seller lists or human-written rules, manually determining which clothes to highlight depending on the season. This navigation technology takes a completely new approach, learning from experience and requiring no manual intervention to perform these types of tasks. In addition to driving significant revenue-per-visit improvements, it can also save retailers the time and expense of manually curating multiple eCommerce pages. The new tool is now available to retailers around the world and supports 72 languages.

The new shelf management AI for Google Cloud retailers
A NielsenIQ analysis of store inventory revealed that empty shelves cost US retailers $82 billion in lost sales in 2021. This has made Google want to find a solution and has come up with a new solution. for shelf verification powered by Google Cloud AI.

This technology will help retailers improve product availability on shelves, provide better visibility into what their shelves actually look like, and help them understand where replenishments are needed. Powered by its Google Cloud Vertex AI Vision tool and powered by two machine learning models (a Product Recognizer and a Label Recognizer), Shelf Check AI enables retailers to solve a very difficult problem. : How to identify products of all kinds, at scale, based solely on the visual and text features of a product, and then translate that data into actionable insights.

Retailers will not have to develop their own AI, they will just have to feed images into the Google Cloud tool. From Google, in addition, they have assured that “retailers will have a high degree of flexibility in the types of images that they can supply to the shelf verification AI“.

In the coming months this technology will be available to all retailers in the world. From now on, retailers will be able to ensure that their store shelves are the correct size and well-stocked.