It seems AI is getting better fast, at least for Google, which said on Tuesday that its recent AI tweaks intended for retailers have begun to drive an increase in Google shopping users.
“Last quarter, we introduced a reinvented Google shopping experience, rebuilt from the ground up with AI,” Google’s SVP and Chief Business Officer Philip Schneider told investors on its Q4 earnings call. “This December saw roughly 13% more daily active users in Google shopping in the US, compared to the same period in 2023.”
Ahead of the 2024 holiday season, the tech giant announced a set of AI improvements plugged into its search capabilities for retailers. For instance, Google said retailers on Merchant Center Next will be able to use Google search to jump on viral shopping trends.
As Retail Brew previously reported, Google also introduced “generative AI-powered insight summaries” in the analytics tab to show merchants summaries of recent product performance. The search giant also added a layer of AI to respond to business queries by retailers. For example, if a merchant asked for the performance of its bestselling dresses, Google would produce a custom data set.
At CES in Las Vegas, Google executives were optimistic that 2025 is going to be a pivotal year for AI and shopping. Egan Brinkman, managing director for commerce at Google, told Retail Brew: “Last year, we saw LLMs [language learning models] find their emergence with Gemini and ChatGPT…But this year, it is going to be the year that AI truly transforms the consumer journey and how they discover, how they research, how they choose to buy.”
In December, Google unveiled a full upgrade to its AI assistant, Gemini 2.0, Google’s agentic AI model. Not surprisingly, agentic AI-enabled shopping assistants were a hot topic for retailers at the recent NRF conference in January.
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