Innovation of the Week: Morrisons partners with Google to launch AI-powered in-store product search function

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Innovation of the Week is a series highlighting retail initiatives that have caught the eye of our team. Every week, we bring you new ideas and case studies across consumer, technology, sustainability, economy, policy and industry.

What is it?

UK supermarket giant Morrisons has partnered with global tech behemoth Google to create a new in-app Product Finder to enhance the shopping experience of its ten million weekly customers.

Built using Google’s Gemini AI models and with the tech company’s Cloud advanced platforms, such as BigQuery and Cloud Run, Morrisons says the new tool will help shoppers quickly locate products within stores, even during busy periods or with seasonal rearrangements.

Morrisons trialled the technology earlier in the year over Easter, and say over 50,000 daily uses of the product.

Customers can simply type in a product name for the store they’re in and instantly receive information on the exact aisle and precise location of the product within the wider store.

The real-time guidance both “significantly improves efficiency and customer satisfaction” according to Morrisons and can be made to work when more temporary or fluid store layouts are in effect.

The in-app tool also utilised Google Cloud Run functions to process customer search terms, while Gemini AI models interpret those queries and then correlate them with Morrisons’ product codes.

Once that information has been collated, it is then sent to BigQuery, which houses back-end product data, including the location and availability of that product for each Morrisons supermarket. It is then fed back to the customer within seconds.

Why it matters

It’s not hyperbole to say that the retail landscape is currently being changed at a remarkable rate by the use of artificial intelligence. However, many retailers and brands are still struggling to find ways of implementing these emerging technologies in ways that make it easier, simpler and more efficient for customers to actually shop.

Morrisons’ new Google-powered Product Finder does all of those things, and creates solutions for customers to help them do the thing which is most important for retailers: find the products they want and, ultimately, buy them.

“The Product Finder is a prime example of how we’re leveraging technology to make shopping easier and more efficient for our customers,” said Peter Laflin, chief data officer at Morrisons.

Strategic implications

It’s easy to see similar product finders being introduced across the other mainline grocers in the UK, as all of them with hyper and supermarkets carry tens of thousands of SKUs, which can make finding products for customers confusing and time-consuming.

Although, there’s no reason to see why this kind of technology couldn’t still be of use to retailers with smaller stores or smaller ranges. Customers could use this technology before going out for a day of clothes shopping, to make sure that the retailers they plan to visit – be they on Oxford Street, Bluewater shopping centre or the centre of a regional market town – have the products they want to try on, in sizes that will fit.

It could also make seasonal shopping a real breeze for customers – perhaps forever killing off the last-minute, mad dash into town, searching for something suitable for a friend or loved one in a blind panic.

These kinds of easy-to-use and easy-to-understand AI tools are going to become the kinds of things that customers simply won’t put up with doing without. Retailers off all sizes and across categories should sit up and take note.