Google hopes to inject a little generative artificial intelligence into the retail industry.

In conjunction with the annual conference of the National Retail Federation in New York, Google Cloud has launched a new product called GenAI, aimed at helping retailers personalize their online shopping experiences and streamline their backend operations.

One of Google Cloud's new products, the conversational commerce solution, allows retailers to embed GenAI-powered agents on their websites and mobile applications, similar to brand-specific ChatGPT. The agents engage in natural language conversations with shoppers and provide personalized product recommendations based on their preferences.

Brand chatbots are nothing new. However, Google claims that "complex" models like PaLM are empowering agents that can be fine-tuned and customized using retailers' own data, such as catalogs and websites.

Complementing the conversational commerce solution is Google Cloud's new catalog and content enrichment toolkit, which leverages GenAI models, including the aforementioned PaLM and Imagen, to automatically generate product descriptions, metadata, and category suggestions from a product photo. The toolkit also allows retailers to generate new product images from existing product images or use product descriptions as the basis for AI-generated product photos.

When eBay introduced a similar AI-driven product image-to-description feature a few months ago, sellers quickly began to complain about its performance, citing misleading, unnecessary repetition, and even outright false text in some cases.

Amy Eschliman, General Manager of Retail at Google Cloud, did not specify what specific measures Google has taken to address concerns surrounding this illusion. She emphasized that Google is constantly improving its tools and that human review is a core part of the catalog and content enrichment workflow.

Eschliman said, "Human-machine interaction is a best practice that helps ensure high quality, reduces bias-related risks, increases trust and transparency, improves and continuously trains models, while complying with regulations and business policies."

In a related announcement, Google unveiled a retail-specific distributed cloud edge device, a managed standalone hardware kit designed to "reduce IT costs and resource investments" around retail GenAI. (Google has long offered distributed cloud edge as a service, but now it is directly targeting retailers. Google states that the edge clusters come in various sizes, from single-server to multi-server configurations, designed to accommodate stores ranging from convenience stores and gas stations to fast-casual restaurants and grocery stores, powering customers' GenAI applications.

"With a locally running control plane, Google's distributed cloud edge provides retailers with uninterrupted operations even when their locations are disconnected from the internet for short periods of time (days)," Eschliman said. "Retailers can now access a small cluster of nodes managed by Google Cloud, which can be easily installed in almost any store. With this fully managed hardware and software, retailers can now run existing software with distributed AI, enabling critical task operations in stores at all times."

Google states that pricing and availability information will be released in the first quarter.

A few days ago, Walmart announced that it is heavily investing in GenAI search to better understand the context of queries and allow shoppers to search by specific use cases (e.g., "unicorn-themed toddler birthday party"). Meanwhile, Amazon has been using GenAI to summarize customer reviews, help sellers write product descriptions and image captions, and better assist buyers in finding clothes that fit them.

In a survey conducted by Google, 81% of retail decision-makers expressed a "sense of urgency" to adopt GenAI in their businesses, while 72% believed they were ready to deploy GenAI technology, particularly in areas such as customer service automation, marketing support and product description generation, creative assistance, conversational commerce, and store staff knowledge and support.