The Home Depot is extending a multi-year relationship with Google Cloud to advance its technology strategy and help customers complete home improvement projects more efficiently and affordably.
The extension comes at a time when an increasing number of retailers are adapting operations to establish a more singular approach to the consumer across in-store and online platforms and to align systems to provide a clearer view and coordination of processes.
Google Cloud noted it has collaborated closely with Home Depot since 2015 to support innovation in its retail technology and improve the retailer’s associate and customer experience in-store, online and cross-channel shopping interactions.
Under the extended partnership, Home Depot will access Google Cloud’s AI capabilities to leverage technologies such as machine learning, computer vision and generative AI to enhance the retailer’s inventory management operations and improve its overall supply chain efficiency. In addition, Home Depot will build e-commerce enhancements to enable greater digital scalability.The retailer also aims to gain deeper insights into customer preferences and needs by harnessing Google Cloud’s Vertex AI platform, advanced model training capabilities and advanced data analytics.
For the past several years, Google Cloud maintained, it has worked with Home Depot to introduce several new capabilities developed to make the retailer’s interconnected experiences smoother, faster and more efficient, and to improve its operations. The launch of the Home Depot’s Sidekick mobile app, which uses cloud-based machine learning and computer vision to help associates keep in-demand products stocked, helped the retailer improve on-shelf availability and customer experience. The rollout of the Home Depot enhanced online search experience, Intent Search, has enabled customers to find products faster with more relevant search results. The deployment of Intent Search has driven significant improvements in click-through rates, conversion and revenue per search, Google Cloud asserted. Home Depot leveraged its partner’s BigQuery data warehouse technology to make targeted improvements to The Home Depot website and initiate supply chain improvements based on analysis of data accumulated over years.
“As one of the first major retailers to migrate our website to the cloud, Google has been a critical partner as we have built an interconnected shopping experience for our customers,” said Fahim Siddiqui, Home Depot executive vice president and chief information officer. “Our technology team looks forward to continuing to work closely with Google to remove friction for our customers when they shop with us and to stay on the cutting edge of retail technology.”
