Google Cloud's Retail Sector Focus

This week at its annual Google Cloud Next conference, Google Cloud's new CEO Thomas Kurian announced Google Cloud for Retail, a cloud platform designed to help retailers with hosting, inventory management, search, and product recommendation. This industry focus is part of Thomas Kurian's master plan for Google Cloud to improve its enterprise capabilities around target specific industries.

Google Cloud for Retail is a platform with tools meant to help retailers with predicting sales, recommending products with the help of artificial intelligence, and more. It's partnering with customers like Unilever, Procter & Gamble, IKEA, Tyson Foods, Nestle, Bed Bath and Beyond, Carrefour, Designer Brands, Kohl's, Loblaw, METRO, Ocado, Shopify, Target, The Home Depot and Ulta.

This is the first time Google Cloud was launching an AI product to address a business process for a specific vertical. Kurian also emphasized that Google Cloud was building capabilities to help companies in specific industries, such as healthcare, media, financial services, retail, and manufacturing.

Google Cloud for Retail will also include hosting capabilities, which can help during peak traffic times like Black Friday, as well as increased support for peak times. This is important because if a website crashes during Black Friday, it can hurt a company's revenue and brand. In addition, it will include real-time inventory management and analytics capabilities to give retailers data on which products are in stock. There are also search capabilities, including a mobile-phone feature allowing customers to take photos or screenshots of products they like and use them to search for similar items sold by a retailer. Finally, it will include product recommendations intended to help retailers deliver personalized recommendations to customers, based on their online behavior.

Other new Google Cloud AI products, while not retail-specific, also can be used by retailers, including AutoML Tables, which is in beta. It allows retailers to build machine learning models on structured data to more quickly fill in their merchandise assortment and optimize distribution. Contact Center AI, which also is in beta, helps retailers with intuitive customer service by scaling phone support without compromising the customer experience. Its virtual agents can automatically help callers with the most common tasks and its agent assist tool can automatically feed information -- relevant information and workflows -- to human agents for those more complex calls. This allows for a dialogue, which makes it easy to build intelligent chatbots that can answer questions and perform tasks through natural language. Google Cloud has integrated this with the top telephony providers and contact center providers in the market, so this can just insert directly into what clients have today without rip-and-replace.

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