Kohl’s rolled out an all-in-one AI assistant on July 29 aimed at the back-to-school season, combining style advice, visual search, product comparison and order support in a single conversational interface. The tool runs on Google Cloud’s Gemini Enterprise for Customer Experience — the same platform that, in a competitor’s early test this year, was linked to a 4.75× increase in revenue per visit (a 375% gain).
How Kohl’s AI assistant works
The assistant accepts natural-language requests — for example, “put together a back-to-school outfit, $60 budget.” It can ask follow-up questions, query the live product catalog, add items to the cart and handle customer-service tasks (order tracking, BOPIS — buy online, pick up in store — and promotions). The platform is multimodal, so users can upload a photo and the agent will find similar in-stock products. Under the hood, the system likely uses a retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) architecture and preconfigured agents that preserve context throughout the customer journey.
