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FairPrice taps Google Cloud to build agentic AI workforce
Singapore’s largest retailer is deploying a suite of agentic AI applications built on Google’s Gemini, Vertex AI and Agentspace to transform its customer experience and internal workflows
FairPrice Group, Singapore’s largest retailer and supermarket chain, has teamed up with Google Cloud to deploy a range of agentic artificial intelligence (AI) applications and capabilities designed to improve customer experience and employee efficiency.
These include AI-powered smart shopping carts and specialised in-store assistants that have been rolled out at the FairPrice Finest store in Singapore’s Punggol Digital District (PDD), as well as an internal platform to help staff build their own AI agents.
Vipul Chawla, group CEO of FairPrice, said the AI-powered tools are designed to make a shopper’s journey more seamless and intuitive, noting that they don’t just impress shoppers, but also empower FairPrice employees to work more efficiently.
The move builds on FairPrice’s existing partnership with Google Cloud to embed the latest cloud and AI technologies across its retail touchpoints as part of its Store of Tomorrow initiative.
For a start, FairPrice has enhanced its smart shopping carts with a multimodal shopping assistant built using Google Cloud’s agent development kit. The assistant uses Google’s Chirp 2 speech recognition model and the Gemini application programming interface (API) to allow conversational queries.
With the enhancement, a shopper can now ask the cart for recipe ideas, and a combination of AI agents will provide recommendations, list the necessary ingredients and confirm which are in stock. This is powered by a product search agent using Vertex AI Search and a knowledge agent built on Vertex AI’s retrieval augmented generation engine.
The enhanced smart shopping carts are set to be deployed at a second location, FairPrice Finest Thomson Plaza, in the fourth quarter of 2025.
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Meanwhile, FairPrice is also deploying specialised AI assistants for specific in-store needs. For example, a wellness assistant at the Unity pharmacy in the PDD store can provide lifestyle advice and product recommendations based on data from a body composition analyser. At the wine section, a digital sommelier, activated via near-field communications on electronic shelf labels, offers tasting notes and food pairing suggestions.
FairPrice is also piloting Vertex AI Search for Commerce, which is designed to better understand local context and dialect terms, such as “orh nee”, a local yam paste dessert, to improve search relevancy for its smart cart assistant and other customer touchpoints.
Another key element of the collaboration is the use of Google Agentspace, allowing FairPrice employees to build, manage and use AI agents. The platform integrates with Google Workspace and allows staff with no coding experience to create their own agents using a no-code agent designer.
FairPrice has already built a custom creative agent for its marketing teams. The agent uses Google’s Imagen 4 and Veo 3 models on Vertex AI to generate images and videos for promotions, and the Gemini API to write ad copy, reducing the time needed to create ads by 10 times and associated costs by 100 times.
The retailer also plans to use Agentspace to speed up the development of more custom agents for functions such as HR, customer service and store operations, with IT administrators able to apply security and access controls to ensure that employees’ use of AI agents is aligned with security and compliance policies.
Thomas Kurian, CEO of Google Cloud, said: “Google Cloud offers a highly differentiated and comprehensive portfolio of infrastructure, open platforms, models, tooling and agents that are enabling organisations around the world to transform their business with AI. FairPrice’s use of these technologies – extending from the storefront to the back office – is an incredible example of how AI is driving innovation across every customer touchpoint and corner of the enterprise.”
