Home Depot Deploys AI Voice Agents Across 50 Stores, Resolving Customer Calls 4x Faster Than Phone Menus
Home Depot (NYSE: HD) announced AI-powered voice agents for customer service on April 22, 2026, built on Google Cloud’s Gemini Enterprise for Customer Experience. A 50-store pilot showed the agents recognize caller intent in under 10 seconds and resolve issues 4x faster than traditional phone menu navigation. The company plans to roll the system out to all 2,359 U.S. stores within the year.
How It Works
Customers calling a pilot store speak the reason for their call in natural language instead of navigating a touch-tone menu. The system, powered by Gemini’s conversational audio models, identifies intent and routes to resolution. It supports real-time translation in any language, according to the announcement.
The agents go beyond answering questions. They can check order status, confirm product availability, initiate service requests, send product links to a customer’s pre-filled cart, and help complete purchases by phone. A planned feature will let customers describe a project in their own words while the agent builds a shopping cart with the required items based on real-time inventory.
Every interaction preserves a direct path to a human associate.
Pilot Results
Jordan Broggi, EVP of customer experience and president of online at Home Depot, framed the shift in the official announcement: “We’re moving away from ‘Please listen to these options’ and toward ‘how can I help?’” Associates in pilot stores reported higher job satisfaction, with more time to focus on in-store shoppers rather than fielding routine phone queries.
The system is trained on Home Depot’s full product catalog and internal “orange-apron” knowledge base, the company’s term for its associate expertise documentation.
Scale and Context
Home Depot operates 2,359 retail stores and over 1,250 SRS locations, employs over 470,000 associates, and is a Dow Jones Industrial Average component. The AI voice agent deployment covers their entire U.S. store network by year-end if the rollout proceeds as planned.
The announcement was made at Google Cloud Next ‘26, where Google also unveiled the Gemini Enterprise Agent Platform and eighth-generation TPUs. Google Cloud VP of Applied AI Darshan Kantak said Home Depot’s deployment shows how retailers “can use AI to move beyond automation and deliver real customer value at scale,” per the release.
The Retail Agent Race
Home Depot is the first Fortune 20 retailer to announce production voice agents at this scale. The deployment joins a growing wave of retail agent announcements: Sendbird reported BJ’s Wholesale seeing 20% basket size increases from AI concierge agents, and Shoplazza launched AI-native commerce agents for 650,000+ merchants. The difference with Home Depot is the channel: voice, not chat. Phone calls remain the primary customer service channel for home improvement, where project complexity makes text-based support insufficient.
For retailers evaluating agent deployments, the 4x speed improvement on a 50-store pilot with a clear national rollout timeline sets a concrete benchmark to measure against.