How retailers are accelerating AI into production with NVIDIA and Google Cloud

Retailers have always moved quickly to connect and match the latest merchandise with customers' needs. And the same way they carefully design every inch of their stores, the time and thought that goes into their IT infrastructure is now just as important in the era of omnichannel shopping.

As retail organizations increasingly adopt AI foundation models and other AI technologies to improve the shopping journey, robust infrastructure becomes paramount. Retailers need to be able to develop AI applications and services quickly, reliably, robustly, and affordably, and with support from Google Cloud and NVIDIA, leading companies are already accelerating their time to market and achieving scalable costs as they move AI from pilots into production.   

Google Cloud has worked with NVIDIA to empower retailers to boost their customer engagements in exciting new ways, deliver more hyper-personalized recommendations, and build their own AI applications and agents; we’ve also integrated prebuilt generative AI agents for customer service to drive immediate savings. With the NVIDIA AI Enterprise software platform available on the Google Cloud Marketplace, retailers can streamline AI development and deployment through scalable NVIDIA infrastructure running on Google Cloud.

Now, retailers can also leverage NVIDIA NIM microservices, part of NVIDIA AI Enterprise and available on Google Kubernetes Engine (GKE) to deploy generative AI models at scale, optimize inference, and handle large volumes of inquiries at reduced costs.  

Retail customers and partners are combining Google Cloud with NVIDIA AI Enterprise to unlock AI transformation at scale. 

• Reduce costs and enhance customer satisfaction: LiveX AI stands at the cutting edge of generative AI technology, building custom, multimodal AI agents that can deliver truly human-like customer experiences. Google Cloud and LiveX AI collaborated to help jumpstart LiveX AI’s development, using GKE and NVIDIA AI Enterprise. In a matter of three weeks, LiveX AI and Google Cloud worked together to deliver a custom solution for its client, resulting in a reduction in customer support costs by up to 85%.
  
  “NVIDIA’s software on Google Cloud brings two of the best technology leaders together. NVIDIA’s easy-to-use NIM microservices, available on Google Cloud, are secure and reliable, and help deploy high-performance AI model inference more quickly and affordably. NVIDIA NIM microservices and GPUs on GKE accelerated LiveX AI Agent’s average answer/response generation speed by 6.1x, enabling real-time, human-like interactions for customer support, shopping assistance, and product education, boosting growth, retention and customer experience.”  – Jia Li, Co-Founder, Chief AI Officer, LiveX AI

• Improve responsiveness: AI practices like text embeddings and vector databases help retailers make more relevant recommendations by using more data, but this can also slow the experience down. The in-house engineering and data science organization at a top-5 U.S. grocer collaborated with Google and NVIDIA to optimize models for better performance.
  
  By using NVIDIA AI Enterprise software’s performance and caching improvements in its Vertex AI endpoint, the grocer cut inference time from several seconds to just 100 milliseconds — without changing the model. This now makes large-scale, real-time personalization possible. Learn more about the benefits of combining Google Cloud's Vertex AI platform and NVIDIA AI Enteprise software.

• In-store analytics and innovation: AI is advancing how brick and mortar stores understand customer engagement, creating new opportunities to personalize the shopper journey. Standard.ai is accelerated by NVIDIA Metropolis, also available with NVIDIA AI Enterprise on the Google Cloud Marketplace, giving retailers and consumer goods precise visualization of customer journeys and creating actionable insights analyzing factors in real time, such as dwell time, shopper orientation, proximity, and engagement with products, ads, and high-impact zones.
  
  “The NVIDIA Metropolis platform and DeepStream software development kit have enabled us to seamlessly deploy our video pipelines across Google Cloud data centers and on-prem GPUs, and, in combination with model optimizations through the NVIDIA TensorRT ecosystem of application programming interfaces, we have cut our image preprocessing time to one-third, significantly reducing our infrastructure footprint." – David Woolard, Chief Technology Officer, Standard.ai

Accelerate AI transformation 

Influenced by the rapid advancements of AI, the retail landscape is evolving faster than ever. For retailers looking to stay on the cutting edge, the collaboration between Google Cloud and NVIDIA continues to offer access to the latest in AI models, infrastructure, platforms that ensure scalability, and development tools all in an environment that’s built on responsible AI practices and best-in-class security.

Get started now with NVIDIA AI Enterprise on Google Cloud to maximize your AI investments and scale across your enterprise.