Singapore’s largest retailer FairPrice Group has expanded multi-year collaboration with Google Cloud to pioneer agentic AI solutions that will help better retail experiences.
The partnership also extends to FPG employees, equipping knowledge and frontline workers with AI agents to improve efficiency and innovation.
The initiative, part of FairPrice’s Store of Tomorrow program, will involve launching a suite of agentic AI assistants, all developed using Google Cloud’s Agent Development Kit and open standards like the Model Context Protocol.
Shoppers can take advantage of these assistants at FairPrice Finest Punggol Digital District.
Vipul Chawla, group CEO at FairPrice Group, said 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,” he said.
FairPrice has integrated a multimodal shopping assistant into its Smart Carts to further raise 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 personalized product recommendations.
This experience is driven by multiple AI agents working in concert. They include a multi-turn conversational agent, a product catalog and inventory search agent, and a knowledge agent.
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.
