• Saved £85,000 on software licenses by consolidating productivity in Google Workspace 

• Reduced data retention and management costs

• Centralized company data in Google Drive to improve data-driven decision-making

• Empowers users to customize and automate workflows with Gemini

• Collaborate in real time with external business partners on joint projects

Ocado Retail offers nearly 50,000 grocery products in its online store — compared to the average 30,000 in traditional large supermarkets. It manages this volume through its joint hardware and software strategy. "Being technology-first means updating our warehouse robotics to offer shorter lead times and exceed customer expectations, as well as recognizing where we can implement new software," says Johnson. "This includes large data science initiatives, as well as becoming an early adopter of generative AI."

As part of these ongoing growth efforts, Ocado Retail partnered with Google Cloud Premier Partner, Devoteam. The companies have worked together to push the capabilities of the grocer's tech stack. "Ocado Retail and Devoteam have become one team. We can send them questions about solutions, any challenges we are experiencing, and more, and they always respond promptly," Johnson says. "They also share updates about coming features and support training sessions to help us build genuine excitement about our roadmap."

During Ocado Retail's initial migration to Google Workspace, Devoteam's IT review process helped consolidate software licences, improve the company's data retention policies, and ultimately save Ocado Retail £85,000. Since then, the partnership has evolved, focusing on finding new ways to make Ocado Retail even more efficient to better serve its customers. "Our industry has incredibly thin profit margins, so the more efficient we can be day to day and reduce waste, the lower we can set prices, and the better value we can pass on to our customers," Johnson adds.

With these additional tools and resources, Ocado Retail has found its teams are looking forward to finding new ways to work. In 2024, the company decided to run a pilot for Google Workspace with Gemini, and its employees quickly took to automating and simplifying their daily work. "People used to have to wait for some IT project to automate away mundane and repetitive tasks," Johnson says. "With Gemini, we've had users come to us and share new ideas and ways to improve ways of working. So many people wanted to sign up and try it, and thankfully, Google AI is now included in Workspace Business and Enterprise plans, bringing the latest generative AI capabilities to our users." Throughout this process, Devoteam has worked closely with the Ocado Retail team to implement a change management strategy, which ensured staff felt comfortable using Gemini across each Workspace application. Devoteam has supported the creation of a culture that embraces AI by establishing an internal committee of Gemini SMEs who are able to help their colleagues optimize their use of Gemini. Devoteam also provides ongoing training sessions to identify even more use cases across the business.

Throughout the company, Ocado Retail is using Google Workspace with Gemini to automate notetaking and summarization for meetings, and its marketing team is now using Gems to quickly create "back of pack" copy, the in-depth product details on individual pages, for its massive product catalogue. "Back of pack copy can easily be dull and boring — just relisting the package details," Johnson says. "Our marketing team has fed our tone of voice guidelines into Gemini to help write individualized, branded content. We can suggest recipes or make jokes and generally make our products more appealing to shoppers."

The Ocado Retail team also uses NotebookLM to summarize unstructured customer feedback which is valuable for identifying trends and issues as they emerge. So far, this has saved analysts an estimated two days of work per week.

Ocado Retail continues to work closely with Ocado Group on major infrastructure initiatives, such as migrating across retail sales platforms. Since both organizations use Google Workspace, they're able to easily share and collaborate on projects in real time. "Migrating nearly £3 billion of revenue to a new platform is a frightening undertaking," Johnson says. "I don't know how it would even be possible without being able to collaborate in Google Docs or Google Slides live on Google Meet calls together." These live sessions include everything from senior strategy meetings to remote team-building and brainstorming sessions where team members use Slides as a virtual whiteboard.

As the company facilitates more and more cross-team and cross-company meetings and projects, its trove of internal data grows. Johnson and his team want to centralize as much data as possible in Google Workspace and Google Drive, so they can more easily analyze and act on data from a single source. Looking ahead, the team is working with Devoteam to use these vast internal resources in concert with Google Agentspace to further optimize operations. "I'm personally excited by the prospect of AI agents," Johnson says. "Being able to delegate tasks based on data we already have or conduct instant, universal searches across our entire company database are great places to start, but there are so many processes we can potentially automate to let our teams focus on what they do best."