Google Cloud's ambitions in AI-powered commerce are taking shape at the customer touchpoint, with a new collaboration announced this week placing generative AI directly in the hands of luxury fashion advisors.
OTB Group, parent company of Diesel, Jil Sander, Maison Margiela, Marni, and Viktor&Rolf, has entered a strategic collaboration with Google Cloud to deploy a Virtual Try-On experience powered by Google Cloud's Gemini Enterprise Agent Platform. The initiative is designed as a premium clienteling tool, enabling store advisors to share hyper-realistic visual previews with selected customers rather than replacing the human relationship at the centre of luxury retail.
The project will launch initially across Diesel and Jil Sander in the US and Europe, before expanding to Marni and Maison Margiela in the months ahead. Beyond the virtual fitting element, customers will also be able to use AI image editing, built with Google's Nano Banana, to place themselves within the brands' latest campaigns or fashion events, with the resulting images brought to life through video generated by Google's Veo model.
The strategic intent is explicitly omnichannel. OTB Group designed the tool to bridge consumers' physical and digital journeys, using high-quality AI visuals to encourage in-store appointments where customers can experience products first-hand. Rather than positioning AI as a substitute for physical retail, OTB is deploying it as a driver toward it.
The broader Google Cloud commerce play
The OTB announcement is the latest in a series of moves by Google Cloud to establish its AI stack as foundational infrastructure for next-generation commerce, spanning both the consumer experience layer and the transactional layer beneath it.
In March, Nexi Group, a leading European paytech, and Google Cloud announced a memorandum of understanding to build infrastructure for agentic commerce, in which AI agents autonomously navigate shopping journeys and execute secure payments on behalf of consumers, strictly based on their explicit authorisations. That collaboration also committed Nexi to supporting open-source commerce standards, including the Universal Commerce Protocol and the Agent Payments Protocol, to enable AI-facilitated shopping journeys across the European market.
Taken together, the two partnerships point to a coherent Google Cloud strategy: working at both the front end of customer experience, with tools like Virtual Try-On, and the backend transactional layer, where agentic commerce standards are still being established.
Why personalisation at this scale matters
The business case for investment in this space is well-supported by research. According to McKinsey, 71 percent of consumers expect companies to deliver personalised interactions, and 76 percent report frustration when it doesn't happen. Closing this expectation gap for personalisation at scale is where the challenge lies.
McKinsey's analysis highlights that generative AI enables marketers to develop tailored content at scale and at lower cost, something that has historically been cost-prohibitive for highly customised, small-group communications. The firm also found that companies pushing incremental sales through targeted personalisation approaches can see a “1 to 2 percent lift in sales and a 1 to 3 percent improvement in margins”.
For luxury fashion, the stakes are higher still. At the clientele level, the value of a single converted appointment can be significant. OTB Group Chairman and Founder Renzo Rosso described the collaboration as realising a vision he had been nurturing for over three years, calling it "the natural direction for the evolution of e-commerce and clienteling."
Whether virtual try-on at the advisor level translates into measurable conversion uplift will be the test that follows. But as Google Cloud continues to expand its commerce partnerships across Europe, the infrastructure for AI-native retail experiences, from personalised visuals to autonomous payments, is assembling at pace.