Lowe's is betting that AI agents powered by Google Cloud can become do-it-yourself home improvement companions and offer personalized customer experiences.
Neelima Sharma, SVP Omnichannel and Ecommerce Technology at Lowe's, will be a speaker at Google Cloud Next 2025. Sharma said tools like Google Cloud Agentspace can be the next evolution of customer experience.
"We continue to look at ways where we can build a stronger relationship with a customer," said Sharma. "If an agent is going to be part of that it will be taking machine learning, generative AI, and autonomy to become the home improvement companion for our customers."
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Lowe's bet on Google Cloud to be a big part of its digital transformation, which has been chronicled at Constellation Insights. In 2020, Lowe's and Google Cloud expanded their partnership to focus on commerce, merchandising, supply chain and pricing as well as customer experience. The idea was to create a "channel-less" customer experience. See: Lowe's betting on AI to drive customer experience, optimize multiple processes (PDF) | Lowe's bets on AI, technology to navigate slowing demand
Since that expansion, Google Cloud has enabled Lowe's engineering platform as well as its Total Home Strategy.
Google Cloud envisions AI agents as a way to meld what are disparate functions inside a retailer. Agents will carry out specific tasks like marketing campaign creation and research, but the promise of agentic AI is working across functions.
The retail challenge
Carrie Tharp, vice president of solutions and industries at Google Cloud, said the retail industry is frequently under pressure due to shifting consumer expectations, market share shifts and uncontrollable developments like tariffs.
Given the pace of change in the industry it will be critical to have merchandising, advertising, supply chain and other functions connected by agents, said Tharp.
In addition, the customer journey in retail is increasingly longer in retail. "AI has become a critical engagement point," said Tharp. "Five years ago, I would have told you the average touchpoints in the consumer journey was six. We now see up to 10. Even worse we see consumers delaying decisions when they have too much information."
Sharma said Lowe's is looking to use AI, search and multimodal visualization capabilities to provide good experiences for the retailer's associates and customers.
"We started a journey with giving the best experience for our customers. We very quickly followed up with associates who are selling to our customers, and we modernized that. And now we've been focused on modernizing our corporate systems," explained Sharma. "That framework has been extended to AI as well. We have taken a very orchestrated approach towards AI to personalize our customer experience, help our associates while they sell and bring the power of all the data sources together in a conversational style."
The goal: Home improvement partner
Sharma said if Lowe's is successful with AI, it will be able to be "our customers home improvement partner" and help them find exactly what products and services they need for complex projects.
To be that home improvement partner, Lowe's needs to leverage AI as well as its data and machine learning foundation via Google Cloud.
Lowe's has laid the foundation to set up for agentic AI and enhanced experiences. Sharma said the company will be closely watching technology developments to see how it can advance its cause.
"We have more than 50 models in production today and deep learning capabilities including search models, recommendation models, sourcing, demand planning, performance pricing, promo and so on so forth. With generative AI, we are actually bringing more generated content on top of all these models," said Sharma.
