This Google exec is enlisting AI to influence how you shop this holiday season

Good morning, Broadsheet readers! Salesforce executive Sarah Walker was named chief operating officer of Slack, Kym Arnone is leading Jefferies' municipal business to one of its best years yet, and this Google exec is influencing how you shop this holiday season. Have a great Thursday!

- Shop 'til you drop. Like many retail and e-commerce execs, Google's Stephanie Horton is getting ready for the close of yet another holiday season. This time around, she notes, it's the first holiday season since generative AI became part of the consumer zeitgeist. That means that consumers are using new tools for their holiday shopping.

Horton is one of the execs influencing how we shop today. She's Google's senior director of global consumer marketing for shopping and payments. In that role, she helps drive the use of tools like Google Pay and Wallet as well as smaller shopping features for consumers, including some new ones for the holidays.

This year, Google has added a host of new shopping tools, including virtual try-on for apparel, augmented reality for the beauty industry through a partnership with makeup artist Pat McGrath, and Google Search features that surface applicable results when consumers type in "shop deals" or "get it by December 24." Horton says generative AI can help shoppers find gifts for hard-to-buy-for friends and family, offering more specific recommendations. Instead of generating general cooking gift ideas, for example, the tool will suggest items for someone who specifically likes pickling or making homemade pasta, she says.

"Consumers are being smart about their money," Horton says. Whether that's purposefully shopping from a local business or looking for a deal amid high inflation, shoppers are being intentional about how and where they spend. "Meeting consumers where they are is very important this year," she adds.

Before she arrived at Google, Horton was CMO for Farfetch, the luxury retailer (that, as of this week, is in the process of delisting from the New York Stock Exchange in a fire sale deal), and chief strategy officer for Alexander Wang. She was initially skeptical of making the jump to Google but realized that "it was [still] shopping" and she had "lots of experience in retail."

Her resume gives her a slightly different perspective than some of her colleagues, who came to Google Commerce through the tech industry. (Google's VP/GM for commerce, Maria Renz, is an Amazon alum, for example.) "It's a little bit of the art and science," Horton says. While her colleagues build products, she says she "understand[s] the nuance of trends and how the industry works," from merchant preferences to the retail calendar. Retail is only becoming more entwined with the tech industry, as these major annual moments make clear.

As for the holiday shopping marathon, Horton admits she's a last-minute shopper, and she advises others in the same boat to take advantage of Google Search's filter for last-minute gifts.

Emma Hinchliffe
emma.hinchliffe@fortune.com
@_emmahinchliffe

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