Enhances search capabilities with visual search with Vertex AI Search to help customers find products more easily
Personal shoppers reduce search time for 'price/promotion/stock' categories by 94%, with a conversion rate uplift of 10%
Reduces deployment time from six to two months with Gemini Flash to rapidly introduce new AI use cases and delivers timely sentiment analysis response to business units with self-service customer insight chatbot powered by Gemini that analyzes more than one million customer feedback annually to drive improvements
Accelerates AI transformation across the organization with AI Circle of Excellence, AI Squad for best practices and knowledge sharing, and AI Academy for fostering AI awareness through classes and workshops
Central Retail Group employs Google Cloud AI and machine learning solutions to automate tasks, thus improving customer experiences and potentially sales, while maintaining a personalized touch.
Central Retail Group employs Google Cloud AI and machine learning solutions to automate tasks, thus improving customer experiences and potentially sales, while maintaining a personalized touch.
Elevating customer experience with AI
AI is revolutionizing the retail industry, enabling us to work smarter and deliver personalized customer experiences. While AI is a valuable tool, it cannot fully replace the human touch. Leveraging Google Gemini for our personal shopper chatbot, we're able to automate tasks such as the shopping list, improving customer experiences and potentially sales, while maintaining a personalized touch.
Max Pakapol
Senior Vice President and Head of Digital Office, Central Group
Central Retail Group, a subsidiary of Central Group, operates Tops supermarket, the largest supermarket chain in Thailand. A fleet of personal shoppers assists online customers in selecting and purchasing their grocery items. Initially launched through Tops Thailand LINE official account on [October 9, 2024], Chefbot streamlines the sales process by generating shoppable recipes based on customer preferences. Leveraging external data, the gen AI chatbot, powered by Gemini, maps recipe ingredients to over 50,000 Tops-specific product stock-keeping units (SKUs), creating a shopping list for the personal shopper. By automating the customer order process, personal shoppers can save valuable time per order and focus on cross-selling and upselling complementary products.
Why Google Cloud?
Merchandisers previously spent hours writing product descriptions in English and Thai for 400 new products daily, adhering to Central Retail's strict content guidelines. The team now utilizes an AI-powered catalog enrichment tool to generate product descriptions, significantly reducing time and ensuring consistency. The tool leverages pre-trained large language models (LLMs) with Vertex AI to extract product attributes like name, brand, and price from existing descriptions. These SEO-optimized product descriptions enhance product discoverability on the department store website by incorporating relevant keywords. Central Retail is currently exploring Vertex AI Vision to extract visual context from product images, further enriching product data.
Enhanced personal shopping experience for customers
At the same time, Central Group improves the personal shopping experience for its department store customers by introducing AI-driven visual search. Powered by Vertex AI Search for retail, the tool analyzes and recognizes images uploaded by customers and matches them to relevant products in the product catalog. The real-time results are shared with personal shoppers so they can help customers buy the right products.
This helps to reduce the searching time for items under the price/promotion/stock categories from 32 minutes to between one to two minutes, a 94% reduction. In addition, conversion rate has been uplifted by 10% with the help of the tool.
Central Retail Corporation Public Company Limited ("the Company" or "Central Retail") is the leading multi-format and multi-category retailing platform in Thailand. Central Retail is also growing internationally, securing leadership status in Italy, and becoming one of the leaders in Vietnam.
Industry: Retail
Location: Thailand
Products: Gemini, Vertex AI, Vertex AI Search
