Kohl’s launches AI Mother’s Day gift finder with Gemini Enterprise

Kohl’s is trying to replace the usual maze of category filters with a conversational gift finder that starts with the recipient’s hobbies, interests and style. The new Mother’s Day Gift Finder, built with Google Cloud’s Gemini Enterprise for Customer Experience, lets shoppers upload an image, review product details and add items to cart without ever leaving the chat.

That matters because gift shopping usually fails at the point of translation. A shopper may know Mom loves gardening, yoga or a particular color palette, but traditional site filters still force a leap from sentiment to SKU. Kohl’s is betting that guided discovery will close that gap faster than scrolling through “gifts for her” pages or waiting for a sales associate to decode an idea from a few vague clues. The company said the tool is meant for budget-conscious shoppers, planners and last-minute buyers, a clear signal that speed and relevance now matter as much as product selection.

Google Cloud introduced Gemini Enterprise for Customer Experience at NRF 2026 on Jan. 11, framing it as an agentic system for retail and restaurant service that can move across the full customer lifecycle, from discovery to post-purchase resolution. Google says the platform can be deployed in days and is designed to maintain context, reason across touchpoints and handle multi-step tasks with customer preferences and consent in mind. In a gifting context, that means the experience can behave less like a search bar and more like a concierge that keeps track of what a buyer already liked, rejected or nearly chose.

Kohl’s is also using the same shift internally. Associates are testing an AI analytics tool powered by Google Cloud’s Conversational Analytics in Looker, which is designed to let teams ask direct questions about trends by category or brand instead of pulling multiple reports and stitching the data together by hand. That kind of back-end speed matters because personalization is only as good as the retailer’s ability to understand what customers are actually choosing.

The retailer has been building toward this for years. In 2022, CIO reported that Kohl’s had about 1,000 people in IT, including 50 data scientists, and was moving key workloads to Google Cloud and BigQuery as it worked toward becoming a more fully data-native company. Kohl’s April 23 company post shows that AI is now part of the public-facing strategy as well as the infrastructure behind it. For shoppers, the promise is simple: less guessing, better matches and a gift that feels considered even when it was chosen in minutes.