Michaels Debuts Google-Powered AI Shopping Assistant

Arts and crafts retailer Michaels has introduced an artificial intelligence (AI)-powered shopping assistant dubbed “Ask Mike.” Ask Mike was built with Google Cloud’s Gemini Enterprise for Customer Experience and is designed to provide “real-time, personalized creative guidance” to Michaels’ online shoppers, the company said in a news release Tuesday (July 21). “In a digital landscape where choice is abundant, Ask Mike transforms shopping from a standard search-driven task into a guided, creative