Recently, Google has been considering adding a product that has many consumer successes to retail as a service. All of them have something to do with cloud computing, and Google hosts the services it offers to its retail partners. We spoke with Jose Gomes, his Director of Managing Retail and Consumer Packaged Goods at Google Cloud, at his 2023 conference at the National Retail Federation this week. TechRepublic gave his insight into how the enterprise his cloud is changing and how the world’s biggest tech companies are using it.
For example, for about 18 months, Macy’s has been running a variant of Google Search powered by browsing AI on its website. It enables natural language analysis — up to a point. If a customer searches for a dress to wear to a baby shower, your website may return results for maternity wear, which isn’t necessarily the right choice.
Google Glass, once primarily a consumer product, is seeing new life as a work tool. Demonstrations at the conference included a near-seamless translation tool. Another demonstration showed how warehouse workers could use Google Glass to direct hands-free what items to pick and where to put them.
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Economic Impact on Enterprise Cloud
Still, organizations may be wary of making changes that don’t have immediate effect now. Industry standards echo what Neiman Marcus also said the day before, Gomes said, as organizations moved from “lift and shift” infrastructure clouds to transformation clouds.
“Organizations are more focused than usual on profitability, efficiency and return on investment,” says Gomes.
There is also a sense of urgency in these processes today.
“If you’re going to save money, you have to save it this year,” he continued.
As a result, Google focuses on enterprise services that are ready to implement or already in place. Cloud use cases can still be elusive, so the smart thing to do is to focus on what is already being implemented today.
Implementation should be considered in weeks, not months. Gomes used Loews as an example. Loews started with his one cloud-powered deployment for production, and now he does about 20 deployments a day.
Retailers are also moving away from doing business with data centers, Gomes said.
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One of the themes that emerged in our conversations with Gomes was that the cloud frees up organizations to worry less about technology and think more about the value they can derive from related services. For example, Kroger uses her Google database technology to combine a large number of data his signals and tell employees the next best action based on the value of that action and the state of the store.
AI/ML can also be used to consume and blend real-time data signals that are not normally connected. For example, a single dashboard can show and correlate whether someone has clocked in and where the company’s truck is. AI/ML can detect patterns and ultimately combine them to provide actionable intelligence about where human labor is best spent in a store.
The ideal path, says Gomes, “is to move from prescriptive diagnostic insights to predictive recommendations and ideally prescriptive.” “People want AI and ML to lead to more automation and more predictive recommendations.”
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Where are you on your journey?
Enterprises may see increasing value at the end of the cloud adoption process as the most important factor, but some organizations move closer to that end, some farther away, and some adopt more quickly or more slowly.
But according to Gomes, retail is ahead of many other industries and has been looking for applications to organize its data for a relatively long time. Gomes cautions, but this is also an area that supports the right engineering talent.
“Your organization depends a lot on your approach and how open you are with your partners,” he said. “What we’ve seen is his two approaches, or the use case approach, of moving all the data to the cloud and then figuring out what to do with it.”
The former can depreciate previously used technology, resulting in significant cost savings.
“But to do it right, you have to do both,” Gomez said.
Organizations must decide whether to use the cloud first to reduce costs and then unlock use cases or keep novel use cases in mind.
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Customer experience is top priority for retailers
Improving the associates’ experience and making training easier and faster has been a topic of discussion on the show several times. Additionally, many NRF companies emphasized that their ultimate goal is to create a positive customer experience. In retail, the biggest barrier to that can start with the supply he chain or the lack of real-time visibility of the shelf. What if a customer orders an item online and it says it’s in stock on the store shelf, but it turns out it’s not? prize.
Google Cloud’s Shelf Check AI attempts to address this problem by automatically identifying items to improve the availability of products on the shelf and provide up-to-date information about which items are in stock. increase. Browse AI is API-driven, so businesses can integrate it into their existing tech stacks and solutions.
“Every use case that someone is talking about today usually requires another piece of hardware, another set of infrastructure that has to be installed in the store,” says Gomes. “I believe that by adding another layer to the platform, we can obfuscate it. We can create a seamless platform.”
For more on retail cloud, see Neiman Marcus talks about cloud migration to AWS at the NRF conference. Additionally, Microsoft has just launched a commercial service based on the Azure OpenAI Service, making the cloud open to malware as well as legitimate actors.