The Home Depot uses AI voice agents to understand customer intent in seconds, reduce wait times, and deliver faster, more seamless support experiences.
The Home Depot has introduced AI-powered phone agents designed to help customers get support faster using Google Cloud’s Gemini Enterprise for Customer Experience.
The system enables customers to skip traditional phone menus and instead describe their issue in natural language, allowing the AI to understand their needs and provide assistance more quickly.
Customers can state the reason for their call in their own words, with the system designed to immediately identify the request while still offering the option to connect with a human associate.
Real-time translation capabilities also allow the system to support customers in multiple languages, improving accessibility and customer experience.
ALSO READ: Only 35% Contact Centre Leadership Reports Clear Long-term AI Strategy
Early results from a 50-store pilot show that AI voice agents can understand customer intent in under 10 seconds, enabling customers to reach a solution four times faster than traditional phone systems.
The system reduces time spent navigating menus, allowing customers to focus more on completing their projects and enabling associates to spend more time assisting in-store shoppers.
“Nobody likes getting trapped in a phone menu. When a customer calls us, they just want to get help as quickly as possible. Using customer service AI voice agents, we’re moving away from ‘Please listen to these options’ and toward ‘How can I help?’ AI does a tremendous job at recognising customer intent and taking direct action to help complete a purchase or even start a service request. And of course, if they need to speak with an associate, we’ll quickly connect them,” said Jordan Broggi, Executive Vice President of Customer Experience and President, online at The Home Depot.
ALSO READ: Why Everyday Value Matters More Than Points in Travel Loyalty
The system is trained on The Home Depot’s product catalogue and operational knowledge to support a range of customer interactions, including answering queries, initiating service requests, and assisting with purchases.
Key capabilities include:
- Get answers without the wait: The AI voice agents are empowered to resolve common customer inquiries from start to finish, such as checking an order status, confirming product availability, or providing store information, freeing up Home Depot associates to handle more complex issues.
- Take direct action to save time: The system moves beyond simply providing information to acting on behalf of customers. For example, AI agents can initiate service requests, send a product link directly to a customer’s pre-filled cart, and even help customers complete a purchase in minutes right from their phones.
- Turn project ideas into ready-to-buy carts: Customers will be able to simply describe their projects in their own words, and the AI voice agent will start building a digital shopping cart with all the necessary items based on real-time online or in-store inventory.
“The Home Depot is a prime example of how retailers and large enterprises can use AI to move beyond automation and deliver real customer value at scale. By integrating Gemini Enterprise for Customer Experience capabilities, The Home Depot isn’t just directing traffic or routing calls—it is instantly understanding a customer’s true intent and applying the reasoning of an expert associate to find solutions,” said Darshan Kantak, Vice President, Applied AI, Google Cloud.
The Home Depot plans to expand the AI voice agent system across all US stores over the coming year to further enhance customer service experiences.
ALSO READ: Agentic AI Is Moving CX From Pilots to Performance
Amplitude is a product analytics platform, enabling businesses to track visitors with the help of collaborative analytics. The platform leverages the capabilities of 
Zoho Social, a part of Zoho’s suite of 50+ products, is a comprehensive social media management platform for businesses and agencies. The Zoho Social dashboard includes a robust set of features, such as Publishing Calendar, Bulk Scheduler, and Approval Management to offer businesses all the essential social media publishing tools. Its monitoring tools help enterprises track and respond to relevant social conversations.
Microsoft Dynamics 365 represents a robust cloud-based CRM solution with features such as pipeline assessment, relationship analytics, and conversational intelligence. It utilises AI-powered insights to provide actionable intelligence via predictive analytics, lead scoring, sentiment analysis, etc. Currently, Microsoft operates in 190 countries and is made up of more than 220,000 employees worldwide.
HubSpot is an inbound marketing, sales, and customer service software provider, offering robust CRM and automation solutions. Some of its products include Marketing Hub, Sales Hub, Operations Hub, Content Hub, Commerce Hub, Marketing Analytics and Dashboard Software. Guided by its inbound methodology, HubSpot enables companies to prioritise innovation and customer success.
Monday.com is a project management software company, offering a cloud-based platform that enables businesses 
Headquartered in San Mateo, California, Freshworks is a global AI-powered business software provider. Its tech stack includes a scalable and comprehensive suite for IT, customer support, sales, and marketing teams, ensuring value for immediate business impact. Its product portfolio includes Customer Service Suite, Freshdesk, Freshchat, Freshcaller, Freshsuccess, and Freshservice. Freshservice for Business Teams has helped several global organisations to enhance their operational efficiency.
Talkdesk offers an innovative AI-powered customer-centric tech stack to its global partners. The company provides generative AI integrations, delivering industry-specific solutions to its customers. Talkdesk CX Cloud and Industry Experience Clouds utilise modern machine learning and language models to enhance contact centre efficiency and client satisfaction.
The company offers comprehensive cloud-based solutions, such as Microsoft Dynamics 365, Gaming Consoles, Microsoft Advertising, Copilot, among other things, to help organisations offer enhanced CX and ROI. Its generative-AI-powered speech and voice recognition solutions,such as Cortana and Azure Speech Services empowers developers to build intelligent applications.
IBM is a global hybrid cloud and AI-powered 
Uniphore is an enterprise-class, AI-native company that was incubated in 2008. Its enterprise-class multimodal AI and data platform unifies all elements of voice, video, text and data by leveraging Generative AI, Knowledge AI, Emotion AI and workflow automation. Some of its products include U-Self Serve, U-Assist, U-Capture, and U-Analyze. Its Q for Sale is a conversational intelligence software that guides revenue teams with AI-powered insights, offering clarity on how to effectively keep prospects engaged.
Google Cloud accelerates every organisation’s ability to digitally transform its business. Its enterprise-grade solutions leverage modern technology to solve the most criticial business problems 
8×8 offers out-of-the-box contact centre solutions, assisting all-size businesses to efficiently meet customer needs and preferences. It offers custom CRM integrations support and integrates effortlessly with third-party CRMs like Salesforce, Microsoft Dynamics, Zendesk, and more. Offering global support in all time zones & development teams in 5 continents, its patented geo-routing solution ensures consistent voice quality.
Sprinklr is a comprehensive enterprise software company for all customer-focused functions. With advanced AI, Sprinklr’s unified customer experience management (Unified-CXM) platform lets organisations offer human experiences to every customer, every time, across any modern channel.
Upland offers a comprehensive suite of contact centre and customer service solutions with products including InGenius, Panviva, Rant & Rave, and RightAnswers. InGenius enables organisations to connect their existing phone system with CRM, further enhancing agent productivity. Panviva provides compliant and omnichannel capabilities for highly regulated industries. Whereas, Rant & Rave, and RightAnswers are its AI-powered solutions, 
Hootsuite, headquartered in Vancouver, is a social media management platform that streamlines the process of managing multiple social media accounts. Some of its core offerings include social media content planning and publishing, audience engagement tools, analytics and social advertising. Its easy-to-integrate capabilities help marketing teams to schedule and publish social media posts efficiently.
Brandwatch enables businesses to build and scale the optimal strategy for their clients with intuitive, use-case-focused tools that are easy and quick to master. Bringing together consumer intelligence and social media management, the company helps its users react to the trends that matter, collaborate on data-driven content, shield the brand from threats and manage all the social media channels at scale.
Adobe Experience Cloud offers a comprehensive set of applications, capabilities, and services specifically designed to address day-to-day requirement for personalised customer experiences at scale. Its platform helps play an essential role in managing different digital content or assets to improve customer happiness. Its easy-to-optimise content gives users appropriate marketing streams, ensuring product awareness.
Salesforce-owned Tableau is an AI-powered analytics and business intelligence platform, offering the breadth and depth of capabilities that serve the requirements of global enterprises in a seamless, integrated experience. Marketers can utilise generative AI models, AI-powered predictions, natural language querying, and recommendationsons.
Contentsquare is a cloud-based digital experience analytics platform, helping brands track billions of digital interactions, and turn those digital 
Zoho Corporation offers innovative and tailored software to help leaders grow their business. Zoho’s 55+ products aid sales and marketing, support and collaboration, finance, and recruitment requirements. Its customer analytics capabilities come with a conversational feature, Ask Zia. It enables users to ask questions and get insights in the form of reports and widgets in real-time.
Fullstory is a behavioural data platform, helping C-suite leaders make informed decisions by injecting digital behavioural data into its analytics stack. Its patented technology uncovers the power of quality behavioural data at scale, transforming every digital visit into actionable insights. Enterprises can increase funnel conversion and identify their highest-value customers effortlessly.
Started in 2005 in a Sweden-based small town, Norrköping, Voyado offers a customer experience cloud platform that includes a customer loyalty management system. This platform helps businesses design and implement customer loyalty programs, track customer 
TapMango provides a comprehensive, customisable, flexible and feature-rich customer loyalty program. The loyalty tools include an integrated suite of customised consumer-facing technology, easy-to-use merchant tools, and automation algorithms, all aimed at enhancing customer experience. Adaptable to any industry, TapMango’s platform helps merchants compete with larger chains, converting customer one-time purchases into profitable spending habits.
Adobe Experience Cloud offers a comprehensive set of applications, capabilities, and services specifically designed to address day-to-day requirements for personalised customer experiences at scale. Its innovative platform has played an essential role in managing different digital content or assets, to improve customer happiness or satisfaction. Some of its products include Adobe Gen Studio, Experience Manager Sites, Real-time CDP, and Marketo Engage.
