The world's leading home improvement retailer chose Centific and Google Cloud Platform (GCP) to roll out a proprietary suite of GenAI tools designed to help customers with their home improvement projects by answering how-to and product questions—all in one easy-to-use chatbot interface. For the busy selling season, the chatbot is available 24/7 to assist with detailed questions for products, projects, and beyond.

The client needed to modernize and enhance its customer service with AI-driven applications

To maintain its competitive advantage in an evolving industry, the client needed to meet increasing data demands, improve scalability and efficiency, and incorporate AI-driven enhancements into customer service.

While scoping the project, Centific teamed up with its In-house IT team to collaborate on response ranking and data labeling using human-in-the-loop (HITL) frameworks, aiming to provide a more efficient, accurate, and secure solution.

The client’s customers have always relied on the expertise of the orange-aproned associates in the aisles of their stores to answer questions and help customer solve problems.

The chatbot is designed to bring that same expertise to the digital world, leveraging the client’s proprietary knowledge base to support its customers and give them the confidence they need to tackle their home improvement projects anytime, anywhere. Whether a customer’s staining their deck, searching for the latest grill, or sprucing up their garden for spring, the chatbot is ready to help with any home project needs.

But to make the chatbot a truly magical application, the client needed to develop AI-driven customer service applications and knowledge management systems hosted in GCP. The solution would need to use innovative AI and ML models and advanced data embedding.

Centific and GCP supported the client in achieving key objectives

Centific, GCP, and the client remained strategically focused on building a modern, customer-centric infrastructure that fostered efficiency and furthered innovation.

1. Cost optimization: GCP’s cost-efficient infrastructure helped the client reduce operational expenses and optimize resource utilization, contributing to sustainable business growth.

2. Customers experience enhancement: Centific enabled the client to implement AI-driven customer service solutions—including chatbots and knowledge management systems—to improve response times, enhance customer satisfaction, and empower service representatives with faster access to information.

3. AI and data innovation: The AI-driven solutions implemented enabled the client to use advanced agentic AI capabilities for product evaluation, response ranking, and evaluation as well as red teaming and HITL frameworks to improve customer service.

4. Security and compliance: Centific and GCP helped ensure uninterrupted security governance and compliance with industry standards, safeguarding data integrity and security across the client’s critical systems. This was done through a variety of red teaming prompts intended to test the model's safety and memory, jailbreak the model, etc.

Centific empowered customer service teams with AI-driven solutions

By developing AI chatbots and intelligent search applications, Centific transformed the client’s customer service capabilities. This transformation included enabling rapid, context-aware responses and enhancing the accuracy and relevance of knowledge management responses.

Centific also introduced HITL validations to the end-to-end bot responses and ranked and scored them based on bot efficiency, improving accuracy and speed in customer interactions.

Through GCP’s cloud-based architecture, Centific provided the red teaming support that the client needed to align its AI systems with its compliance and security needs.

Centific also used an HITL framework to help ensure quality through ongoing evaluation and refinement of AI model outputs, enabling the client to continuously improve its customer service capabilities while maintaining data integrity.

Centific’s frontier AI data foundry platform provided the foundation for this project’s success

Centific’s frontier AI data foundry platform provided a centralized environment for:

• Data management and AI model training, using LLMs for accurate and context-aware responses. 

• An HITL framework, which helped ensure routine QA and iterative refinement for AI models, fostering continuous improvement in customer experience service delivery.

Today, when customers research products on homedepot.com, the chatbot is available to answer product questions, provide project guides, and summarize product reviews.

Together with GCP, Centific helped the client ensure the response accuracy and validated security and compliance. The chatbot can currently be found on millions of product pages on homedepot.com and on the client's award-winning mobile app.

Why Google Cloud?

The Home Depot selected GCP for its ability to offer:

• A scalable infrastructure that supports the needs of a global payment system.

• Advanced data and analytics tools, such as BigQuery, allow the client to gain faster and more insightful data analysis.

• Seamless microservices deployment through GKE, enabling the client to optimize its operations and ensure reliable service delivery.

• Robust security features to protect the client’s financial data and help ensure compliance with regulatory standards.

The client’s AI transformation journey is off to a great start

The technology will soon expand to the client's professional B2B site, offering enhanced support tailored to professional contractors and business account users. The chatbot is also slated to routinely roll out new features and to be accessible across homedepot.com.

Like a personal home improvement concierge, it will feature new functionality to assist customers with project inspiration, design ideas, product comparison and recommendations, comprehensive advice and more. The technology will continue to learn from customer and associate feedback and serve as a foundational tool for store and contact center associates to better help customers.

Centific’s holistic approach, enabled by its frontier AI data foundry platform, helped the client execute a seamless transition to cloud-based and AI-driven customer service, setting a strong foundation for future innovation and customer satisfaction.

Learn more about Centific’s frontier AI data foundry platform.