New Way Now: Albertsons Companies delivers fresh data insights for better products with Google AI

*Featured in this video:* Dave Newton, Vice President of Supply Chain and Store Operations Technology for Albertsons Companies *Executive summary:* After migrating from on-prem to cloud a few years ago, grocery retailer Albertsons Companies set about tackling its massive volumes of data, which had increased significantly since the COVID pandemic. The company unified its data using BigQuery to create a single source of truth for on-hand inventory, orders in progress, upcoming deliveries, product availability, and more. With the scale and processing capability of that infrastructure in place, Albertsons Companies added AI and data science solutions for the company across its more than 2,200 stores including well-known banners Albertsons, Safeway, Vons, Jewel-Osco, Shaw's, ACME and Tom Thumb. They added Gemini, Gemini Enterprise Agent Platform (formerly Vertex AI), and Vision AI and have so far built an AI-powered Quality Inspection Tool and a shopping AI assistant. Vision AI’s use of advanced vision AI models lets Albertsons Companies capture and analyze product images, then compare them against Albertsons Companies’s established quality standards instantly. AI capabilities from Google have also improved employee productivity by simplifying dashboards and creating optimized workflows, in addition to saving many manual hours evaluating stale or bad data. *Challenge:* Albertsons Companies had to unify all their data sources into a single platform to empower employees and suppliers, streamline customer experiences, and ensure the freshest food for shoppers. And the retailer needed to add flexibility into its supply chain to ensure the highest quality produce arrived in store, plus bring AI tools into production to support employees and create great customer experiences, both in store and when ordering online. *Solution:* Albertsons Companies added BigQuery to its cloud platform to unify data and make it more easily accessible to other systems companywide, helping employees get data insights faster for better decision-making. Albertsons Companies added Gemini Enterprise Agent Platform and Vision AI to infuse AI into daily company operations: they’ve standardized recipes across the company and built an AI-powered Quality Inspection Tool to speed up product inspections. *Results:* Albertsons Companies’ BigQuery enterprise inventory solution brought a single, unified view of all inventory data across stores, distribution centers, and vendor orders. They’ve cut vertical siloes and added flexibility into typically rigid supply chains, and customers can now see up-to-date inventory when ordering online. Albertsons Companies’ operations team can see immediate details about when orders will arrive at stores, and their AI-powered Quality Inspection Tool moves produce more quickly to customers. Gemini Enterprise Agent Platform and Gemini have also helped remove stale or bad data across the company, leading to standardized recipes across stores and other updates that would have taken hours of manual work. AI has improved multiple supply chain functions and cut transportation costs, as well as bringing data access and insights to business users. *Key takeaways and highlights from our interview with Dave Newton, Vice President of Supply Chain and Store Operations Technology for Albertsons Companies:* → “It’s this massive data layer that comes from integrating all those solutions together from end to end. You can ask how much of a product we have and carve it up any way you want, whether it’s total inventory or total pieces.” → “Rigidity is easier. It takes less effort. Flexibility is harder, and you need to know more possible options. What can help fill that gap is AI.” → “Data used to be old. We ran a lot of systems that would run functions weekly, maybe daily, maybe some hourly. That’s not really good enough anymore. Now, we start with real time. Is 30 seconds long enough? Can we take as long as an hour to execute that transaction?” → “People don’t want to come in in the morning and look through 50 dashboards trying to find the thing they should do. They all have dashboard fatigue. AI is really good at going through a whole bunch of data and recommending the six things to look at today.” *Google Cloud products used:* BigQuery, Gemini, Gemini Enterprise Agent Platform, Vision AI *Learn more:* → Albertsons Companies and Google are making grocery shopping easier with cloud technology https://cloud.google.com/blog/topics/retail/ordering-groceries-online-made-easier-with-google-search → Deliver intuitive shopping experiences with Conversational Commerce agent https://cloud.google.com/blog/products/ai-machine-learning/introducing-conversational-commerce-agent-on-vertex-ai → AI Commerce Search on Gemini Enterprise for Customer Experience https://cloud.google.com/solutions/vertex-ai-search-commerce → Vision AI: Image and visual AI tools https://cloud.google.com/vision