Google wants to introduce a little genetic AI into retail. Or try to, at least.
To coincide with the National Retailers Association’s annual conference in New York, Google Cloud today unveiled new artificial intelligence products designed to help retailers personalize their online shopping experiences and optimize their back-office operations .
As to whether they perform as advertised, this writer can’t say — TechCrunch wasn’t given a chance to test the new tools before this morning’s unveiling. (They’re set to launch sometime in Q1.) But the flurry of announcements shows, if nothing else, how aggressively Google is trying to woo its AI customers.
One of Google Cloud’s new products, the Conversational Commerce Solution, allows retailers to integrate AI-powered agents into their websites and mobile apps — kind of like a brand-specific ChatGPT. Agents have conversations with shoppers in natural language, tailoring product recommendations based on shoppers’ individual preferences.
Branded chatbots are nothing new. However, Google says that “sophisticated” models like PaLM power dealers, which can be optimized and customized with retailers’ own data (eg catalogs and websites).
The Conversational Commerce Complementary Solution is Google Cloud’s new Catalog and Content Enrichment toolset, which uses next-generation AI models including the aforementioned PaLM and Imagen to automatically generate product descriptions, metadata, categorization suggestions and more from a photo product. The toolset also allows retailers to create new product images from existing ones or use product descriptions as the basis for AI-generated product photos.
Now, when eBay rolled out a similar AI-powered picture-to-description product description feature a few months ago, it didn’t take long for sellers to complain about its performance — showing misleading, unnecessarily repetitive, and in some cases downright untrue text.
I asked Amy Eschliman, managing director of retail at Google Cloud, what steps, if any, Google has taken to address concerns about such hallucinations. He didn’t point to specific measures, but emphasized that Google is “constantly improving” its tools and that human review is a key part of its Directory and Content Enrichment workflows.
I certainly hope there is human review where the stakes are high. It’s not inconceivable, after all, that a misleading AI-generated image or description in a product catalog could land a retailer in hot water with shoppers — or accept false advertising claims.
“Human-in-the-Loop is a best practice that helps enterprise use cases to ensure high quality, mitigate the risk of bias, improve trust and transparency, improve and continuously educate model while complying with regulatory and business policy.” Esliman said.
In a related announcement today, Google completed a retail-specific Distributed Cloud Edge appliance, a managed hardware kit to “reduce IT costs and resource investments” around retail AI. (Google’s Distributed Cloud Edge has long been offered as a service, but now targets retailers more directly.) Available in a range of sizes from single-server to multi-server configurations, Google says the edge cluster is designed to fit stores from convenient convenience brands and gas stations to fast-casual restaurants and grocery stores — powering the AI applications of the customer generation.
“With the … control layer operating locally, Google Distributed Cloud Edge provides retailers with uninterrupted operations even when their location is disconnected from the internet for short periods of time (days),” Eschliman said. “Retailers now have access to a small cluster of nodes managed by Google Cloud that can be easily installed in almost any store. With this fully managed hardware and software, retailers can now run existing software with distributed AI to enable shipment-critical in-store operations at any time.”
Google says pricing and availability information will be released in Q1.
My question after being informed about all of this in advance was, honestly, are retailers really clamoring for the AI generation?
Maybe. At least the retail giants.
Walmart announced yesterday that it is investing heavily in generational search AI to better understand the context of queries and let shoppers search based on specific use cases (eg “unicorn-themed toddler birthday party”). Amazon, meanwhile, is leveraging Gen AI to summarize customer reviews, help sellers write product descriptions and image captions, and enable shoppers to find clothes that fit their size.
In a survey conducted by Google, Google says that 81% of retail decision makers feel an “urgent need” to adopt gen AI in their business, while 72% are ready to deploy Gen AI technology today — especially in areas of customer service automation, marketing support and product description generation, creative assistance, transactional commerce and store associate knowledge and support.
However, given some of the lackluster showings of AI generation in retail recently (see: Amazon review summaries with overly negative comments), I can’t say I’m convinced the retail industry will rush to adopt the generation en masse AI — from Google Cloud or any other provider. I guess we’ll have to wait and see.
