The National Retail Federation's (NRF) annual event, NRF 2023, will start on Monday, Jan. 16, at the Javits Convention Center in New York City, VentureBeat reports.
Ahead of the event, Google Cloud unveiled the newest artificial intelligence (AI) technologies to help retailers improve in-store inventory shelf-checking, online shopping, personalized search, and product recommendations.
A Changing Landscape for Retail
In the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic, shoppers are looking for a more seamless and natural online shopping experience, according to Amy Eschliman, Managing Director of Retail Solutions at Google Cloud.
Before the pandemic, 80% of transactions took place in stores. However, the virus caused a sudden shift to digital, which has sped up this trend.
Eschliman told VentureBeat that while in-store shopping has resumed, the pandemic has forever changed how consumers shop. Retailers now have to deal with this new reality by making online shopping more personalized and accessible.
A Solution By AI
To meet the new consumer expectations, Google Cloud has introduced an AI-driven personalization feature that customizes the results customers get when they search and browse a retailer's website.
The system called Browse AI uses a customer's behavior on an e-commerce site, such as clicks, cart contents, purchases, and other information, to determine the shopper's taste and preferences.
For personalized and relevant results, the AI then draws products that match those preferences in search and browse rankings. This system ensures increased exposure and even better customer interaction.
Google Cloud's Browse AI
Google Cloud's new Browse AI feature is part of its Discovery AI solutions for retailers. It uses machine learning to select the optimal ordering of products on a retailer's e-commerce site once customers choose a category.
Typically, e-commerce websites sort product results based on category bestseller lists or human-written rules, such as manually determining which clothing to highlight based on seasonality.
Browse AI takes a novel approach by self-curating and learning from experience, saving retailers the time and money associated with manually curating multiple e-commerce pages. The new tool supports 72 languages and is now generally available to retailers worldwide.
More from Google Cloud AI
Google Cloud has also released a new AI-powered shelf-checking solution based on Vertex AI Vision and powered by two machine learning models, a product recognizer and a tag recognizer.
The solution currently in preview globally assists retailers in identifying products of all types at scale based solely on visual and text features of a product and then translating that data into actionable insights.
This system can help retailers manage their in-store inventory more effectively and address the industry challenge of knowing what their shelves look like at any given time and where restocks are needed.
Google Cloud also upgraded its Recommendations AI to make e-commerce more personalized and dynamic. With this, a new page-level optimization feature lets e-commerce sites dynamically choose which product recommendation panels to show shoppers.
Page-level optimization reduces resource-intensive user experience testing and improves user engagement and conversion rates.
For more details about Google Cloud's latest AI tools for retailers, check out this press release.
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