Retail transformation is underway with pilot AI projects. But the biggest impact will come from strategic, organization-wide execution.
Speaking at Retail’s Big Show, hosted by the National Retail Federation in New York earlier this year, executives from Shopify and Google Cloud noted a change in approach. To achieve true business value from AI investments, they said retail CIOs need to standardize processes, unify data, and streamline the large language models (LLMs) they’re using.
“AI is being rolled out with a test here, a test there, but that is not true transformation,” said Jeff Tarullo, a partner solutions engineer at Shopify. “As we look to move forward with AI in the commerce realm, the winners will focus on real business outcomes, not just experiments.”
Tarullo said too many retail enterprises are stuck because they’re working across multiple, disconnected systems and fragmented data sets.
Connecting commerce to AI capabilities
Thanks to innovations in AI and unified data management, led by the partnership of Shopify and Google Cloud, retailers can seamlessly eliminate that infrastructure crust.
For example, Tarullo described how an independent apparel retailer is running its deployment on Google Cloud and connecting to Gemini Enterprise using the Universal Commerce Protocol (UCP).
Gemini Enterprise enables the apparel company to rapidly surface products for online shoppers at the exact moment of intent. In tandem, Shopify’s commerce platform connects customer experience workflows — everything from pricing to checkout.
Together, these capabilities simplify and accelerate the shopper’s experience, while also providing scalability as the organization’s AI and digital transformations mature. The Shopify and Google Cloud partnership helps retailers lay a foundation for:
- Greater inventory visibility, which in turn improves sales forecasting capabilities and boosts data utilization
- The shift to agentic commerce, allowing retailers to deploy AI agents that can rapidly create more dynamic customer experiences
Tarullo said Shopify’s partnership with Google Cloud provides conversational commerce capabilities to help retailers resolve other issues.
“Today, one in two customers who land on your website go straight to the search bar, but only one in 10 actually find what they’re looking for. That’s a massive gap,” he said.
Retailers can close that gap by using the Shopify platform’s integration with Google Cloud’s Gemini Enterprise Agent Platform, which is trained on billions of daily Google queries to better understand how people shop.
“That means that the search box isn’t just somewhere [shoppers] can put keywords and phrases,” Tarullo said. “It allows for an actual conversation with your brand, like they’re chatting with a personal shopper.”
Organizations can also bring Shopify payment data into BigQuery to gain additional insights around customer segmentation, product performance, and marketing effectiveness, according to Tarullo.
Matching AI with business outcomes
As retailers gain confidence with these capabilities, they can further deploy AI to enrich their product catalogs with more accurate data, serve up real-time promotions, and scale customer service, said Chris Colyer, who leads retail strategic partnerships at Google Cloud.
He added that the most important consideration is identifying specific business problems, rather than looking at AI in isolation.
“Successful implementations in retail focus on a single issue,” Colyer said. “It could be everything from resolving customer ticket triage processes to personalizing generic product recommendations.”
But at the end of the day, it is important to keep humans in the loop. Colyer said organizations should treat AI as a “thinking partner” to solve business problems, not as a complete replacement for employees.
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