NEW YORK — Kroger’s roster of AI capabilities continues to grow as the grocer looks to elevate the shopper experience and improve the work environment of its store-level associates.
The grocery company announced on Sunday that it is expanding its partnership with Google Cloud, tapping the technology company’s Gemini Enterprise for Customer Experience solution to establish a “new personal shopping assistant.”
The newly launched Gemini tool’s AI features are designed to support shoppers with grocery planning, lead them to relevant offers and savings, and facilitate quick delivery scheduling.
“Consumers want more choice, more product — we give them more product, more choices. They want more options on how they shop, what day, how quickly we can deliver it. They want pickup on this day — we give them all these options. And what we don’t realize is consumers actually struggle the more choice we give them,” Yael Cosset, Kroger’s chief digital and technology officer, said in a Monday panel at the National Retail Federation’s Big Show in New York. It’s at this point that Kroger’s new capabilities through Google Gemini’s AI-shopping assistant enter the equation, he said.
The AI features of the shopping assistant tool include agentic integration that enables the “assistant” to complete complex tasks based on a single instruction. The tool can convert a customer request into a guided recipe with a shoppable ingredient list and can make recommendations based on Kroger’s proprietary data, real-time assortment, pricing and product availability.
Kroger also announced it will deploy Google’s Customer Experience Agent Studio to analyze interactions and intent on calls made by customers to stores. According to Kroger, this tool will enable the grocer to proactively identify and resolve issues faster as well as improve associate productivity.
Along with flashier consumer-facing AI advancements, Kroger is also finding ways to leverage this technology to cater to its employees.
On Monday, the grocer discussed how it is continuing to improve Sage, an AI virtual assistant for its associates, at a separate panel at the NRF conference.
The platform provides Kroger workers with a single point of access to check their shift schedule, request time off, set shift availability and view their pay stubs from one mobile app, according to a video Kroger played during the panel. And from this, Kroger’s store leaders can get real-time labor data insights as well as view their shift changes, pending punches and time-off approvals.
Employees can also ask Sage direct questions about company policies, training completion and more, the video noted.
“[Sage is] functional, tangible, real-time, 24/7,” said Karl Neimann, Kroger’s vice president of human resources, during the panel with IBM, a digital technologies partner with Kroger.
Niemann added that Sage saves workers from having to search through numerous databases or shared drives to find what they need.
Sage leverages three forms of AI: conversational, generative and agentic, said Ashish Jaiswal, a partner at IBM as well as the lead client partner at Kroger. The conversational AI component provides natural language experience across multiple systems and data sources, while generative AI lets the platform answer questions dynamically against multiple systems and data sources, and agentic AI enables end-to-end workflow automation and dynamic decision making, he said.
Kroger began workshopping and developing Sage in early 2024, and, five months later, the platform was capable of 30 basic use cases that tapped into existing Kroger data, Neimann said. Today, Sage has over 95 use cases and is actively used by up to 150,000 associates, he added.
“We have large stores, a lot of frontline associates,” Niemann said, “A much more self-serve approach means that we can meet our associates exactly where they’re at.”
