FairPrice Group is pioneering agentic AI with Google Cloud. The effort redefines retail, empowering customers with smarter tools and boosting employee efficiency.
Google Cloud and Singapore’s largest retailer FairPrice Group (FPG) announced an expanded multi-year collaboration to pioneer agentic AI solutions that will help redefine retail experiences and empower FPG customers to shop smarter and save more. The partnership also extends to FPG employees, equipping them with AI agents to unlock new levels of efficiency and innovation.
The strategic collaboration, part of FPG’s Store of Tomorrow program, will involve launching a suite of agentic AI assistants, all developed using Google Cloud’s Agent Development Kit (ADK) and open standards like the Model Context Protocol (MCP). Shoppers can take advantage of these assistants at FairPrice Finest Punggol Digital District, which opens today.
Vipul Chawla, Group Chief Executive Officer, FairPrice Group, said: “At FairPrice Group, our purpose is simple: to make every day a little better for our customers. Our collaboration with Google Cloud and the launch of our Store of Tomorrow are testament to this commitment. The new AI-powered tools, from the smart shopping assistant to the personalized wellness assistant, are designed to make a shopper’s journey more seamless and intuitive. These innovations don’t just ‘wow’ our shoppers, they also empower our employees to work more efficiently, so as to uphold our promise of providing affordable daily essentials for all. We believe technology should work for the good of our customers and we’re excited to use it to bring shoppers an even better experience at what we consider to be a first-of-its-kind store in Southeast Asia, with Google Cloud’s partnership and technology as a powerful enabler.”
Thomas Kurian, Chief Executive Officer, Google Cloud, said: “Google Cloud offers a highly differentiated and comprehensive portfolio of infrastructure, open platforms, models, tooling, and agents that are enabling organizations around the world to transform their business with AI. FPG’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.”
Enhanced, conversational Smart Carts further elevate shopping experiences
FPG has integrated a multimodal shopping assistant into its Smart Carts to further elevate the in-store shopping experience. This builds on the Smart Cart’s initial features, such as in-store navigation, a built-in barcode scanner, and the ability to spotlight promotions for nearby products as customers browse the aisles.
At FairPrice Finest Punggol Digital District and Sengkang Grand Mall, shoppers can interact and converse with the in-cart assistant via the cart’s integrated tablet to receive enriched and personalized product recommendations. This experience is driven by multiple AI agents working in concert. They include:
- A multi-turn conversational agent built using Chirp 2, Google Cloud’s most advanced speech recognition model, and the multimodal Gemini API;
- A product catalog and inventory search agent, built using Vertex AI Search and the Gemini API, for retrieving and summarizing product information;
- A knowledge agent built using the Gemini API, Vertex AI RAG Engine, and the Grounding with Google Search API, for processing barcode information and suggesting complementary products based on food recipes and pairings drawn from trusted sources.
When a shopper asks the assistant about a specific dish, “yam paste” for instance, it can intuitively recommend relevant ready-to-eat or ready-to-cook options; items typically served with yam paste like coconut milk and ginkgo nuts; or the full list of ingredients to help shoppers make this dessert – all while specifying which products are available in-store. These enhanced, conversational Smart Carts will next be deployed at FairPrice Finest Thomson Plaza in the fourth quarter of 2025.
FPG is also piloting Vertex AI Search for Commerce internally, in view of embedding this industry-specific solution into its Smart Cart assistant and other customer touchpoints. Once deployed, the solution’s innate understanding of local context, non-English queries, semantic meaning behind queries, and spelling variations will help surface more relevant results for queries like “low fat cheese” – even if product details only contain the term “reduced fat,” ”荔枝” (i.e., “lychee” in Chinese), “orh nee” (“yam paste” in a local dialect), and “chye poh” or “cai poh” (i.e., “preserved radish” in different local dialects).
Unique in-store agentic AI experts for wellness and wine discovery
To address specialized needs, such as selecting health supplements or fine wines, multiple, distinct AI agents collaborate to help consumers make precise and informed purchasing decisions.
At the Unity pharmacy in FairPrice Finest Punggol Digital District, consumers can engage with FPG’s wellness assistant, designed to promote healthier living. Based on a user’s body composition analysis and personal health goals, it provides tailored lifestyle advice, meal plans, and recipes, and an interactive shopping list of FPG products to help individuals turn its guidance into action.
This assistant’s workflow is driven by the core conversational and search agents, plus:
- A data agent turning raw data from in-store Tanita body composition analyzers into insights, by calling the Tanita API and the Gemini API;
- A knowledge agent built using the Gemini API, Vertex AI RAG Engine, and the Grounding with Google Search API, specializing in providing accurate, safe, and up-to-date health and nutrition information from trusted sources.
Shoppers at FairPrice Finest Punggol Digital District can activate FPG’s digital wine sommelier by tapping their phones on a wine product’s near-field communication (NFC)-enabled electronic shelf label. Driven by the same multi-agent architecture as the other two assistants, the digital wine sommelier helps users discover and select wines based on their preferences, such as type, country of origin, price, and occasion. In addition, users can ask this assistant for tasting notes, food pairings, and side-by-side comparisons.
Equipping knowledge and frontline workers with agentic tools
As a core part of its strategy to put enterprise AI into the hands of employees to transform how they work, collaborate, and serve customers, FPG is adopting Google Agentspace, Google Cloud’s unified platform for organizations to build, manage, and use AI agents at scale. This complements FPG’s ongoing use of Google Workspace.
With Agentspace’s agentic intranet search, employees can find and synthesize information faster. Within Agentspace’s Agent Gallery, they can access Google-built agents like Deep Research and Idea Generation, FPG-built agents, and the no-code Agent Designer to create their own agents, thereby allowing them to automate complex tasks and boost organizational agility.
FPG has built a custom creative agent for its price and promotion teams that automates thematic ad creation. This agent uses Google Cloud’s Imagen 4 and Veo 3 models on Vertex AI for image background removal or generating high-quality videos from text or image prompts, and the Gemini API for condensing promotional details into ad copy, before incorporating these elements into predefined layouts. It has supported content creation for recent Price Drop, Buy Now and Durian Buffet campaigns, reducing the time and cost associated with creating these ads by 10 times and 100 times, respectively.
With Agentspace, FPG is poised to accelerate the development and deployment of even more custom agents that streamline workflows in human resources, customer service, customer sentiment analysis, store operations, marketing, and more. Within Agentspace, IT administrators can apply role-based access controls, virtual private cloud controls, and identity and access management controls to ensure that employees’ use of AI agents is aligned with the company’s security and compliance policies.
Mark Micallef, Managing Director, Southeast Asia, Google Cloud, said: “FPG is leading the way in deploying agentic AI in the retail sector. This move underscores their commitment to enhancing customer value and experiences, while empowering their teams to drive innovation from within. Our mutual efforts have delivered solutions that are among the first-of-their-kind in Southeast Asia, underpinned by the unique combination of Google Cloud’s open platforms, Google-quality search, and Google’s advanced reasoning and generative media models. We see FPG’s AI transformation as the proven blueprint for realizing the future of retail, and we’re proud to be its partner as we continue this journey.”
