Quick Facts

• Kohl’s launched its AI shopping assistant on July 29, 2026, expanding a narrower Mother’s Day Gift Finder it debuted in April.
• The tool runs on Google Cloud’s Gemini Enterprise for Customer Experience and supports text, image, and order management queries.
• Macy’s, which uses the same platform, saw revenue per visit run 4.75 times higher among shoppers who used its AI assistant versus those who did not.

Kohl’s has launched a full AI shopping assistant for its website and mobile app, the retailer announced July 29. The tool handles product discovery, price comparisons, order tracking, and customer service handoffs inside a single conversational interface.

The assistant is the second AI product Kohl’s has shipped this year. The company first launched a Mother’s Day Gift Finder in late April 2026, a narrower agent that collected details about a gift recipient’s hobbies and style before returning product recommendations. The new assistant extends those capabilities across all shopping occasions.

Kohl’s built the tool on Google Cloud’s Gemini Enterprise for Customer Experience, the same agentic platform Google announced at NRF 2026. The technology processes multi-step requests and holds continuous context across a session, which means a shopper can move from browsing to order tracking without restarting the conversation.

The assistant supports multimodal input. Shoppers can upload a photo of an outfit and the tool will match it against available Kohl’s inventory. Users can also ask for active deals, request gift ideas, compare products side by side, and add items to their cart without leaving the chat window.

Kohl’s is also testing a companion tool on the employee side. Teams are piloting a conversational analytics product powered by Google Cloud’s Conversational Analytics in Looker, which lets associates ask plain-language questions about product trends and sales drivers without compiling reports manually.

The Google Cloud partnership is not new for Kohl’s. The retailer first worked with Google Cloud in 2019 and has since used the relationship to upgrade data center infrastructure and analytics. Kohl’s operates more than 1,150 stores and reported $3 billion in Q1 2026 revenue. Digital and e-commerce channels accounted for 26% of total company sales that quarter, supported by more than 20 million active mobile app users.

Q1 comparable sales declined 1.1%, though the result outperformed analyst expectations. The company reported a net loss of $14 million, or $0.13 per share, against analyst estimates of a $0.21 per share loss. CEO Michael Bender has been direct about the challenge ahead. “We stopped listening to our best customers for a while,” Bender told analysts. “Today, we start earning them back.”

The Gemini platform has shown measurable results at other retailers. Macy’s rolled out a similar tool called Ask Macy’s and reported that customers who used it generated 4.75 times more revenue per visit than those who did not. Michaels went from concept to a production-grade AI assistant called Ask Mike in six weeks, using prebuilt agent components the platform provides.

Lowe’s has also deployed its own AI shopping assistant, putting Kohl’s among a growing group of major retailers moving toward conversational commerce. Global AI technology in retail was valued at $54.24 billion in 2026 and is projected to reach $287.1 billion by 2032. Retailers using AI and machine learning reported 14.2% sales growth between 2023 and 2024, compared to 6.9% for retailers that did not.

Kohl’s has 60 million customers in the United States and more than 30 million registered loyalty members. The shopping assistant is available now through the Kohl’s app and website.

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