New Way Now: Ocado Retail delivers personalized marketing experiences to 1.2M+ users with Google AI

Описание: Featured in this video: Kieren Johnson, Head of IT at Ocado Retail

Executive summary: Ocado Retail, the world’s largest dedicated online supermarket, continues to redefine how the world shops, powering even more personalized experiences with Google Cloud. With more than 47,000 different products and over 1.2 million active customers, manual creation processes couldn’t scale to produce tailored marketing content needed to make every customer’s experience feel personal. Harnessing Google’s Imagen and Veo models on Vertex AI, Ocado Retail can now quickly generate creative content like ad banners, tailored to the specific product messaging from suppliers and individual shopping preferences. Over 1,500 employees are also using Google Workspace with Gemini and tools like NotebookLM to automate away the repetitive tasks that take them away from the critical work that enables Ocado Retail to serve up fresh value, convenient service, and unbeatable choice for customers. With Google Cloud, it’s a win across the board: Shoppers discover new products through personalized offers, suppliers get more targeted outreach, and teams have more time to focus on what they do best.

Challenge: Suppliers want to connect with customers on a personal level, but Ocado Retail’s manual creation processes struggled to keep pace with the massive scale required to produce unique, tailored marketing content for over 1.2 million active customers across a vast range of more than 47,000 products.

Solution: Building on its previous partnership with Google Cloud to build a strong data and foundation for more advanced personalization, Ocado Retail tapped into Google AI to automate the creation of marketing content, starting with one of its most labor-intensive tasks: ad banners. Using Imagen and Veo models on Vertex AI, Ocado Retail to automatically generate unique, tailored ad banners — a monthly process that previously required over 100 people. In addition, over 1,500 employees are using Google Workspace with Gemini and tools like NotebookLM to automate away repetitive tasks — from taking meeting notes to coding and deep research — giving them more time to focus on the high-value conversations with suppliers and customers that help Ocado Retail deliver fresh value, convenient service, and unbeatable product choice.

Results: With Google Cloud, Ocado Retail has transformed its ability to scale banner creation while enabling more personalized connections between its suppliers and customers — paving the way for broader automation plans, including social media images and video content. Ultimately, this foundational first step has been a win across the board: More value for shoppers, deeper customer connections for suppliers, and more time for teams to focus on building relationships that drive the business.

Key takeaways and highlights from our interview with Kieren Johnson, Head of IT at Ocado Retail:

→ “If you haven't used Veo 3, there’s a genuine ‘wow.’ Suppliers really want the idea that they can speak quite personally to our customers, and we want to help make those conversations possible. But the challenge is there’s over 1.2 million active customers and there's 47,000 products. So if you want to put a large number of different banners or content on your website unique to that relationship — that's obviously at a scale that's impossible.”

→ “We're using Imagen and Veo to help us with our banner creation process. It allows us to scale up so our suppliers can get more personalized messages to our customers. It gives our customers that opportunity to discover new products that they may not otherwise have seen. That is huge. There’s something like 106 people involved in banner stuff all throughout, and we refresh these banners every month. It’s just a huge operation where lots of gears are turning all the time to make this happen. So, we’re really keen to automate some of that.”

→ “Currently, 1,500 of my colleagues are using Google Workspace with Gemini and some standout cases are the things like meeting notes, as a code assistant, as a deep research tool — I literally just used NotebookLM to create a podcast for me. It’s super fast learning. It’s like being in the Matrix.”

Google Cloud products used: Gemini, Veo, Imagen, Google Workspace

Learn more:

→ Ocado Retail: Delivering quality and value to grocery shoppers through efficient operations https://workspace.google.com/customer...

→ Ocado Technology: Delivering powerful product performance with consistent data insights https://cloud.google.com/customers/ocado

→ How one brand grew revenue and reduced churn through scaled customer personalization
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