New Way Now: Lowe’s lays a data foundation for more helpful home management

*Featured in this video:* Chandhu Nair, Senior Vice President of Technology for Data, AI, and Innovation at Lowe's *Executive summary:* Lowe’s, one of the world’s largest home improvement retailers, is building the future of home improvement, pioneering new AI capabilities that give associates superpowers to better serve its customers. After modernizing its online business with Google Cloud, Lowe’s expanded its partnership to renovate its data infrastructure for the AI era, migrating its vast data resources to Google’s data cloud. Using BigQuery and Vertex AI, Lowe’s can now unify all its data — structured and unstructured — and connect it to the latest AI technologies, reducing the time to gain insights to hours instead of days or weeks. Now, Lowe’s has the foundations it needs to power AI apps and tools that enhance in-store search, product recommendations, and inventory optimization, helping hundreds of thousands of store associates across its 1,700 stores confidently assist customers with their home improvement journeys. *Challenge:* Lowe’s had extensive structured data, but also possessed a wealth of valuable unstructured information, such as training materials, manuals, standard operating procedures, and decades of collected practical know-how. Lowe’s wanted to bring together all of its data and utilize it to help associates guide customers more effectively. *Solution:* After modernizing its online business with Google Cloud, Lowe’s expanded its partnership to renovate its data foundations for the AI era. Lowe’s migrated its data resources to Google’s data cloud, using BigQuery to build a unified data analytics foundation and integrating it with Vertex AI to connect all of its data to the latest AI technologies. The new architecture has become the backbone of its AI initiatives, allowing Lowe’s to not only collect data at scale but use it to power new AI apps and tools for search, product recommendations, and inventory optimization. In addition, Vertex AI