What: Walmart has positioned Google’s cloud more deeply at the centre of its most critical initiatives. One of the main propositions of Google’s cloud business lies in artificial intelligence, machine learning and other data-driven services that are tailored for sectors like retail.

Why it is important: Google Cloud’s client list now ranges from established retailers like Macy’s or Sephora to partnerships with LVMH. When Macy’s used Google Cloud’s Retail Search, the department store saw a 2% jump in conversion and a 1.3% uptick in revenue per visit. Ikea’s adoption of the Recommendations AI tool led to a more than 30% boost in click-throughs and more than 2% gain in average order value.

Walmart runs its most data-intensive, critical “decisioning” processes on BigQuery (one of the Google cloud tools), an enterprise data warehouse that manages and analyses partner data using ML, geospatial analysis and business intelligence. It can act on practical insights and make its operation more efficient. Its rivalry with Amazon makes the initiatives fundamentally important, and so far, it has seen concrete results: BigQuery has had a direct impact on the business, improving Walmart’s processing time by 23%.

Across the whole operation, Google’s cloud has facilitated the retail behemoth’s ability to apply AI — from back-end issues like predicting demand, managing in-stock levels and optimizing the supply chain, to freeing up associates to better serve customers.

So far, the retailer has migrated the majority of its data tables, as much as 90%, to the cloud, and it has migrated 30% of the big data. It plans to nearly double that by the end of the fiscal year.

Walmart’s AI Push Drives Google Cloud Deeper Into Its Organization