Cool stuff Google Cloud customers built, May edition: Agentic algorithms for supply chains; virtual try-on APIs; robotic camera operators & more

AI and cloud technology are reshaping every corner of every industry around the world. Without our customers, who are building the future on our platform, there would be no Google Cloud. In this regular round-up , we dive into some of the exciting projects redefining businesses, shaping industries, and creating new categories.

Be sure to check back next month to see how more industry leaders and exciting startups are putting Google Cloud technologies to use. And if you haven't already, please peruse our list of 1,302 real-world gen AI use cases from our customers. Urban Outfitters saves big by migrating order management Who: Urban Outfitters, Inc. (URBN), the popular clothing and home goods retailer, relies on IBM Sterling OMS as the nerve center of its global ecommerce operations.

However, the foundation of this critical system - a massive 11TB Oracle database - was increasingly becoming a bottleneck. What they did: URBN completed a major infrastructure upgrade, migrating its IBM Sterling OMS from an Oracle database to Google Cloud's AlloyDB for PostgreSQL . To enhance performance and provide high availability and scalability, the AlloyDB deployment architecture includes two read replicas, providing low-latency access to data for reporting and analytics.

Google Cloud and IBM teams also assisted URBN in a rigorous, iterative switchover testing strategy. Why it matters: The migration to AlloyDB has fundamentally reshaped URBN's data strategy, delivering a more favorable total cost of ownership through an optimized storage and compute architecture, without sacrificing performance or reliability. Furthermore, the shift to a PostgreSQL-compatible database gave URBN the flexibility of an open-source ecosystem, providing freedom from vendor lock-in , as well as significant speed improvements that enhanced responsiveness.

Learn from us: "URBN's successful migration serves as a blueprint for organizations looking to modernize their mission-critical infrastructure and future-proof their environment for AI expansion. This journey proves that even the most complex, mission-critical migrations can be achieved through deep cross-organizational partnership and a phased, risk-mitigated approach." - Rob Frieman , CIO, Urban Outfitters & Raj Pai , VP, Product Management, Databases, Google Cloud BASF manages supply chain decisions with AlphaEvolve Who: BASF Agricultural Solutions manages a complex network of 180 production sites with more than 5,000 distinct value chains.

Currently, human planners make thousands of local decisions every day on what to produce, when to produce it, and how much safety stock to hold. What they did: To understand how local decisions ripple across their entire global network, BASF turned to AlphaEvolve on Google Cloud to build a digital twin of their supply chain. In collaboration with Google Cloud and prognostica GmbH, BASF fed the model three years of historical data and then generated variations of the code, mutating the logic to see if it could simulate a supply chain that matched the real-world historical data.

Why it matters: By running thousands of experiments, AlphaEvolve developed a clear, human-readable algorithm that explains how the BASF network truly operates. The final algorithm successfully mirrored the actual historical performance of the supply chain, significantly reducing the error rates compared to the initial seed model. It automatically discovered factually correct, domain-specific supply chain rules, providing a clear foundation for optimizing asset utilization globally .