Home Depot expands AI support, speeds customer help fourfold
Home Depot’s AI phone agents now handle customer calls four times faster, which could trim routine store interruptions but raise the bar on in-aisle handoffs.
Home Depot’s newest AI push could change the rhythm of a store day before a customer ever reaches the service desk. The company said its new phone agents, built on Google Cloud’s Gemini Enterprise for Customer Experience, can answer questions in many languages, route callers to a human associate when needed and resolve support four times faster than before.
That matters on the sales floor. Fewer repetitive calls could mean fewer interruptions for associates trying to keep aisles shoppable, pull online orders or help contractors on a time crunch. But it also shifts the pressure somewhere else: if the phone system does more of the simple triage, the customers who do show up may arrive with clearer expectations, tighter pickup windows and less patience for delays when an order is wrong or a project gets complicated.
Home Depot rolled out the phone agents on April 22 at Cloud Next ’26, part of a broader AI strategy that now stretches well beyond voice support. In a March 30 AI overview, the company said it already offered more than a dozen AI-powered capabilities and had more in development. That follows the March 6, 2025 launch of Magic Apron, the generative AI tool now available on the Home Depot app and on millions of product pages online.
The next test is the mobile app. On April 16, Jordan Broggi, Home Depot’s executive vice president of customer experience and online, said the company planned to refresh the app later in 2026 to reduce friction from browsing to checkout. For associates, that kind of refresh can be a double-edged change. Better digital flow may mean more organized baskets, faster pickup behavior and fewer basic questions. It can also mean more customers arriving with exacting expectations about stock, timing and substitutions.
Home Depot’s own annual report says the company’s growth strategy is to deliver a “frictionless interconnected experience” and win with the Pro. The report also said fiscal 2025 net sales were $164.7 billion and that the chain operates more than 2,300 stores across the United States, Puerto Rico and the U.S. Virgin Islands. At that scale, even a small change in how customers start a conversation, whether by phone, app or online product page, can ripple through stores fast.
The company has been building toward that model for months. In January, Home Depot said it was expanding its strategic partnership with Google Cloud with new agentic AI tools. In March, it said it was expanding its Pro digital experience with new project-management and AI tools. Put together, the moves point to a tighter handoff between digital self-service and human expertise, which is good news if the technology removes low-value work and less good if it simply moves the troubleshooting to the store floor.
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