Singapore-based Gill Capital Group, which manages fashion and lifestyle brands including H&M, ALO, and On Running in Southeast Asia, has partnered with Google Cloud to launch a first-of-its-kind generative artificial intelligence (GenAI) solution.

Gill Capital said in a statement on Tuesday that through Google Cloud’s AI Cloud Takeoff (AI CTO) program, it has embarked on multiple AI innovation projects.

One of them involves embedding a gen AI-powered search agent into e-commerce websites and apps (iOS, Android) for H&M Indonesia and H&M Thailand.

Built using Vertex AI Search for Commerce, this AI agent understands the true intent behind search queries in natural language.

On the backend, the agent also automatically analyzes and organizes a vast product catalog, freeing staff up from the tedious task of researching and adding keywords to each product.

Going a step further, Gill Capital is integrating a conversational agent into these platforms.

Also developed using Vertex AI Search for Commerce, this agent serves as a virtual shopping assistant, surfacing personalized product recommendations through multi-turn conversation.

It also helps customers with more complex tasks like checking if an item is in stock at nearby stores.

After piloting these two solutions with an initial group of users, Gill Capital has validated their effectiveness in boosting engagement and sales.

There are now plans to roll them out for H&M Indonesia and H&M Thailand later this year.

“At Gill Capital, we create innovative, localized retail concepts for brands in our portfolio to help them thrive in Southeast Asia,

“While search technology has advanced from keyword-matching to semantic and agentic search, many online retailers haven’t kept pace,” said Victor Siow, Group Chief Data and Analytics Officer, Gill Capital Group.

With Google Cloud, he said the firm is utilizing the same underlying components that power Google Search today to gain a competitive edge.

“By grounding best-in-class reasoning models like Gemini 2.5 Flash on company data sources, we can also ensure our AI agents provide relevant and accurate outputs,

“As part of our AI strategy, we’re now bringing these horizontal search and conversation use cases to other brands while pursuing new applications in key areas like supply chain optimization,” he added.

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