New Way Now: Albertsons increases customer basket size by 10% with Databricks and Google Cloud AI

*Featured in this video:* Ramya Iyer, Senior Vice President of Global Tech and AI, Albertsons Companies

*Executive summary:* Albertsons Companies, one of the largest food and drug retailers in the U.S., is transforming the grocery experience for over 36 million customers by moving from legacy batch processing to real-time, AI-driven intelligence. The retailer first unified data onto BigQuery and layered on Databricks’ lakehouse architecture. Now, Albertsons has launched "Ask AI,” an interactive grocery assistant built using the Conversational Commerce agent from Google Cloud. This transformation has shortened traditional 46-minute shopping journeys by 90% and delivered a 10% increase in customer basket sizes.

*Challenge:* Grocery shopping is often viewed as a chore, and customers increasingly demand speed, convenience, and hyper-personalization. Previously, Albertsons operated in batch mode with siloed systems, multiple data stores, and manual processes. This legacy stack created significant latency: By the time data was processed and models were served, the customer had often already moved on. To stay competitive in a tight-margin industry, Albertsons needed to optimize supply chain and pricing signals in near real time to provide the instant discovery and fun experience their customers expected.

*Solution:* Albertsons partnered with Google Cloud and Databricks to unify all enterprise data into BigQuery and layered on Databricks’ lakehouse architecture, creating a standardized platform with singular governance for data scientists and ML engineers. The team also developed "Ask AI," an agentic tool that replaces traditional search-and-click shopping with a natural dialogue. This system uses Google Cloud's Conversational Commerce agent to combine real-time signals with a customer’s prior shopping history. The platform automatically handles rapid scaling during peak shopping bursts, allowing the team to focus on customer-facing differentiation rather than fundamental infrastructure.

*Result:* The collaboration has redefined the grocery journey, resulting in a 90% reduction in shopping time for many users. Quantitatively, the launch of the Conversational Commerce agent has driven a 10% increase in basket size for engaged customers, contributing to a 21% overall increase in digital sales in 2025. Qualitatively, customers now enjoy a faster, simpler discovery path through personalized recommendations that account for complex dietary restrictions and flavor preferences. By unifying and making better use of its data, Albertsons has moved from manual batch operations to a fully automated, near real-time retail engine.

*Highlights and key takeaways from our interview with Ramya Iyer, Senior Vice President of Global Tech and AI at Albertsons Companies:*

→ “We have enabled our real-time analytics. We are able to consume the data. We have opened up the hoses where we are able to ingest large volumes of data, process it in near real time, and serve it back to the customers.”

→ “What we love about Databricks is the lakehouse architecture, unifying our data and creating a common platform where all our data scientists and engineers and MLOps engineers can operate.”

→ “The platform improvements that we have done with Google Cloud and Databricks were one of the key enablers for our digital growth.”

*Google Cloud products used:* BigQuery, Conversational Commerce

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