Ahead of NRF 2023, the retail industry’s largest event, Google Cloud introduced four new and updated AI technologies to help retailers transform their in-store shelf checking processes and enhance their ecommerce sites with more fluid and natural online shopping experiences for customers.
A new shelf checking AI solution, built on Google Cloud’s Vertex AI Vision, utilizes Google’s database of facts about people, places and things, giving retailers the ability to recognize billions of products to ensure in-store shelves are right-sized and well-stocked. Furthermore, in an update to its Discovery AI solutions, Google Cloud introduced a new personalization AI capability and new AI-powered browse feature to help retailers upgrade their digital storefronts with more dynamic and intuitive shopping experiences. Finally, Google Cloud’s Recommendations AI solution launched new machine learning capabilities that empower retailers to dynamically optimize product ordering and recommendations panels on their ecommerce pages and deliver personalized suggestions for repeat purchases.
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“Upheavals over the last few years have reshaped the retail landscape and the tools retailers need to be more efficient, more compelling to their customers, and less exposed to future shocks,” said Carrie Tharp, VP of Retail and Consumer, Google Cloud. “Despite uncertainty, the retail industry has enormous opportunity. The leaders of tomorrow will be those who address today’s most pressing in-store and online challenges with the newest technology tools, such as artificial intelligence and machine learning.”
The problem of low or no inventory on in-store shelves is a troubling one for retailers. According to a NielsenIQ analysis of on-shelf availability, empty shelves cost U.S. retailers $82 billion in missed sales in 2021 alone. While retailers have tried different shelf-checking technologies for years, their effectiveness has often been limited by the resources needed to create reliable AI models to detect and differentiate products—from the different flavors of jam and jelly, to the dozens of types of toothbrushes.
Now available in preview globally, Google Cloud’s new AI-powered shelf checking solution can help retailers improve on-shelf product availability, provide better visibility into what their shelves actually look like, and help them understand where restocks are needed. Built on Google Cloud’s Vertex AI Vision and powered by two machine learning models—a product recognizer and tag recognizer—the shelf checking AI enables retailers to solve a very difficult problem: how to identify products of all types, at scale, based solely on the visual and text features of a product, and then translate that data into actionable insights.
Retailers don’t have to expend time, effort, and investment into data collection and training their own AI models. Leveraging Google’s database of billions of unique entities, Google Cloud’s shelf checking AI can identify products from a variety of image types taken at different angles and vantage points—an especially difficult task. Retailers will have a high degree of flexibility in the types of imagery they can supply to the shelf checking AI. For example, a retailer can use imagery from a ceiling-mounted camera, an associate’s mobile phone, or a store-roaming robot on shelf-checking duty.
Now in preview, this technology is expected to be generally available to retailers globally in the coming months. Importantly, a retailer’s imagery and data remains their own and the AI can only be used for the identification of products and price tags.
SOURCE: PR Newswire