• by Laurie Sullivan  @lauriesullivan, January 12, 2024

Generative AI (GAI) will have an impact on customer experiences, and that means retailers will rely more on Google, Microsoft, Amazon, Adobe, Oracle and others to get the technology into their operations. 

GAI will be a major focus for Google, Microsoft and others at the National Retail Federation (NRF) conference this week in New York.

Separately, this week, Google and Microsoft announced a series of (GAI) technologies for the retail industry that aim to enhance online shopping experiences and streamline retail operations.

Google hopes retailers will accept the Cloud as the base technology. In its announcement, the retail conversational commerce software uses GAI to enable retailers to quickly implement virtual agents that can have detailed conversations with customers.

Chatbots are not new, but Google believes that models like Pathway Language Model (PaLM) -- Google’s latest language model with improved multilingual, reasoning, and coding capabilities that powers the agents -- will move the technology to the next service level. These chatbots can be customized with a retailer’s first-party data from catalogs and websites to have an in-depth conversation with consumers.

Google Cloud also introduced a new large language model (LLM) capability in Vertex AI Search for retail, which gives retailers the same quality of search, browse and recommendations that Google uses.

In an example of a U.S.-based home improvement retailer whose products are only described in English online, Google says a consumer could receive the home improvement product search information in either English and Spanish.

TechCrunch points out that when eBay launched a similar AI-powered product-image-to-description capability in September, it was only a short time before sellers began complaining about its performance. They pointed to misleading, unnecessarily repetitive and in some cases downright untruthful text.

This past week, Microsoft also launched its own GAI product for retail.

Microsoft on Thursday introduced the Retail Media Creative Studio supported by GAI to create banner ad creatives in seconds based on a product’s web-based link or URL. The goal, Microsoft said, is to make creative building as easy as possible.

In this platform, marketers can take a product photo and turn it into a lifestyle image for a campaign that consumers can relate with by simply prompting the technology to "put this sofa in a cozy living room.”