FairPrice Group's AI Agents Reach Shoppers in Their Own Dialect, Achieve 100x Ad ROI

Singapore’s largest retailer launched new agentic AI applications as part of an expanded multi-year collaboration with Google Cloud. The implementation by FairPrice Group (FPG) goes beyond typical chatbot deployments. It orchestrates specialized AI agents across customer-facing and enterprise workflows at their newly opened FairPrice Finest Punggol Digital District store.

“At FairPrice Group, our purpose is simple: to make every day a little better for our customers,” said Vipul Chawla, the group chief executive officer at FPG. “Our collaboration with Google Cloud and the launch of our Store of Tomorrow are testament to this commitment.”

The technical architecture that understands local lingo

Google Cloud’s Agent Development Kit (ADK) and the Model Context Protocol (MCP) form the heart of FPG's “Store of Tomorrow” — open standards that allow different AI agents to communicate seamlessly.

At FairPrice Finest Punggol Digital District and Sengkang Grand Mall, the smart shopping assistant demonstrates this orchestration. When a customer asks about “yam paste,” multiple AI agents spring into action: Chirp 2 handles speech recognition, Gemini’s multimodal API processes the query, Vertex AI Search scans product catalogs, and a knowledge agent powered by Vertex AI RAG Engine suggests complementary products using Grounding with Google Search API.

The architecture breaks down into specialized agents: a multi-turn conversational agent (Chirp 2 + multimodal Gemini API), a product catalog and inventory search agent (Vertex AI Search + Gemini API), and a product catalog and inventory search agent (Gemini API + Vertex AI RAG Engine + Grounding with Google Search API).

FPG is piloting Vertex AI Search for Commerce, planning to embed this solution into Smart Cart assistants and other customer touchpoints. The solution handles local context, non-English queries, semantic meaning, and spelling variations to surface relevant results for queries like “low fat cheese” (returning “reduced fat” products), “荔枝” (lychee in Chinese), “orh nee” (yam paste in local dialect), and variations of “chye poh” or “cai poh” (preserved radish in different dialects).

FPG also plans to deploy the enhanced Smart Carts at FairPrice Finest Thomson Plaza in Q4 2025. At Fairprice Finest Punggol Digital District, specialized AI assistants, including a wellness assistant at the Unity pharmacy, will provide tailored lifestyle advice based on in-store Tanita body composition analyzer data, utilizing a data agent and a knowledge agent. Consumers can also use the digital wine sommelier via their mobile phones by tapping NFC-enabled electronic shelf labels.

Enterprise AI democratization and proven results

At the employee front, FairPrice is adopting Google Agentspace, Google Cloud’s unified platform for organizations to build, manage, and use AI agents at scale. With Agentspace’s agentic intranet search, employees can find and synthesize information faster. Within the Agent Gallery, they can access Google-built agents like Deep Research and Idea Generation, FPG-built agents, and use the no-code Agent Designer to create custom agents.

The creative agent uses Google Cloud’s Imagen 4 and Veo 3 models on Vertex AI for image background removal and video generation from text or image prompts, plus Gemini API for condensing promotional details into ad copy. It supported FairPrice’s recent Price Drop, Buy Now, and Durian Buffet campaigns, reducing time by 10x and costs by 100x for ad creation.

FairPrice’s implementation includes role-based access controls, virtual private cloud controls, and identity and access management controls within Agentspace to ensure employee AI agent usage aligns with security and compliance policies. With Agentspace, Fairprice plans to accelerate development of custom agents for human resources, customer service, customer sentiment analysis, store operations, and marketing.

“Our mutual efforts have delivered solutions that are among the first-of-their-kind in Southeast Asia, underpinned by the unique combination of Google Cloud's open platforms, Google-quality search, and Google’s advanced reasoning and generative media models,” said Mark Micallef, managing director, Southeast Asia, Google Cloud. “We see FPG’s AI transformation as the proven blueprint for realizing the future of retail, and we're proud to be its partner as we continue this journey.”

Bottom line

This expanded multi-year collaboration between FPG and Google Cloud represents a comprehensive deployment of agentic AI across retail operations, from customer-facing Smart Carts with multilingual capabilities to enterprise workflow automation. The technical achievement lies in the orchestration of specialized AI agents using open standards like Model Context Protocol, enabling everything from speech recognition in local dialects to automated creative content generation.

The business impact is measurable: 10x time reduction and 100x cost savings in ad creation for campaigns like Price Drop, Buy Now, and Durian Buffet. With plans for expansion to Thomson Plaza and ongoing pilots of Vertex AI Search for Commerce, FPG is demonstrating a real-world use case where multi-agent architectures deliver concrete ROI.

Image credit: iStockphoto/Andrzej Rostek