October 13, 2025
Gap Taps Google Cloud to Thread AI Through Every Corner of Retail
Gap Inc. is bringing artificial intelligence to the heart of its business. The retail group behind Gap, Old Navy, Banana Republic, and Athleta has entered a multi-year partnership with Google Cloud, aiming to reinvent how products are designed, marketed, and sold.
The collaboration will see Gap adopting a unified, AI-powered platform using Google technologies such as Gemini, Vertex AI, and BigQuery. The goal is to turn data and machine learning into a source of creativity, agility, and sharper decision-making across every part of the company.
From Concept to Customer, Faster
One of the most promising areas of this partnership lies in product innovation.
The retail group believes adding AI to design and planning will help them get products out faster and give teams better ways to test things. AI could also help predict trends, set prices, and choose which products to offer before they even get to stores.
Thomas Kurian, CEO, Google Cloud, said: “Our partnership with Gap is about reinventing the retail landscape with AI and helping them lead the industry with speed, personalisation, and game-changing customer experiences.”
With this move, Gap wants to free up designers to focus on style and stories, while AI handles the boring stuff like numbers. It’s like mixing human creativity with what the data says.
Personal Shopping for Everyone
Gap is also working with Google Cloud to change how people shop for their brands. They want to use data analysis and AI to make shopping very personal, from suggesting items to creating ads that fit what each person likes.
This builds on how Gap already uses Google Ads, where AI helps make ads better and manage how people engage with them on different channels. The goal is to make shopping feel the same whether you’re online or in a store, which is critical now that shoppers expect stores to know them everywhere.
Gap will also use AI as a “partner”, and not another system, that will help teams make choices and do their jobs every day, allowing for more flexibility and efficiency.
“By redesigning our workflows and putting AI in the hands of every employee, we are freeing Gap Inc. teams to focus on creativity, culture, and customer connection while keeping the company’s human-centred DNA at the core of innovation,” said Sven Gerjets, Chief Technology Officer at Gap Inc.
Last year, Google Cloud introduced the Conversational Commerce agent, a new AI-driven solution built on Vertex AI, designed to give retailers more intelligent, personalised ways to engage with customers.
