Gill Capital Group, a Singapore-based company that manages fashion and lifestyle brands such as H&M, ALO, and On Running across Southeast Asia, has teamed up with Google Cloud to roll out a first-of-its-kind generative AI (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.
Gill Capital is testing new AI tools to make online shopping easier and more personal for H&M customers in Indonesia and Thailand.
One tool is a smart search agent for H&M’s websites and mobile apps (iOS and Android). Built with Google Cloud’s Vertex AI Search for Commerce, it can understand natural language, so shoppers can type what they really mean instead of using exact keywords. In the background, the AI also organizes the product catalog automatically, saving staff from the time-consuming job of tagging items with keywords.
The second tool is a conversational shopping assistant, also powered by Vertex AI. This virtual assistant chats with customers, gives personalized product recommendations, and even handles more complex requests like checking if an item is available in nearby stores.
Gill Capital has tested both tools with a pilot group and confirmed they improve customer engagement and sales. The company now plans to launch them for all H&M customers in Indonesia and 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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