Wesfarmers has saved more than 500,000 hours of administrative work at Bunnings using an internal AI agent, while customer-facing shopping agents across its retail portfolio are driving conversion rates up to three times higher than standard online shopping. The figures, cited at Google Cloud's Gemini at Work 2026 event and confirmed in Wesfarmers' FY26 results, make the Perth-based conglomerate the first retail group in Australia to deploy agentic AI at scale across multiple brands.
This isn't a pilot. It's not a press release about future plans. Wesfarmers — the $60 billion parent company behind Bunnings, Kmart, Target, and Officeworks — has deployed AI agents both internally and externally across its retail operations, and the numbers are in its audited results. For Australian businesses watching the AI agent conversation from the sidelines, Wesfarmers just turned it into a scoreboard.
Four agents, four brands, one group
The rollout centres on Google Cloud's Gemini Enterprise for Customer Experience (GECX) platform. Each major retail brand got its own shopping agent: Buddy at Bunnings, Joy at Kmart, and Ollie at Officeworks. A fourth agent, Onesie, launched in July 2026 through OnePass — Wesfarmers' cross-brand loyalty programme — letting members search and shop conversationally across multiple divisions in one place.
These aren't simple search bars with a chatbot wrapper. Buddy, for instance, guides customers through entire DIY projects. Ask it how to build a wooden planter and it recommends the timber, screws, paint, and tools — linking each to the relevant product page. It can process images, answer safety questions (and steer customers away from jobs they shouldn't attempt themselves), and handle transactions end-to-end.
Wesfarmers Managing Director Rob Scott described the approach in the company's FY26 results: "Led by the Group's 'People-first, Digitally-enabled' approach, new technologies and ways of working were embedded throughout the year to enhance customer experience, support team members and improve efficiency."
Notably, Wesfarmers isn't a single-vendor shop. While Google Cloud powers the customer-facing agents, the company also signed a multi-year deal with Microsoft to deploy Azure OpenAI, M365 Copilot, and Copilot Studio across Bunnings, Kmart, Blackwoods, and Priceline for internal productivity and supply chain operations. It's a deliberate multi-vendor strategy.
The numbers that matter
The headline figure — 500,000 hours saved — was cited by Google at Gemini at Work 2026, and Wesfarmers confirmed it in their own results presentation, noting the "productivity agenda has seen 500k+ hours saved or redeployed into customer service." The redeployed framing is important: this isn't about cutting headcount, it's about redirecting capacity to higher-value work.
On the customer side, the conversion data is striking. Bunnings' Buddy has more than doubled online conversion rates for transactions that flow through it, with a significant uplift in average order value. At Kmart and Officeworks, shopping agents are delivering up to three times the conversion rate of standard browsing.
A senior Wesfarmers executive described the mechanism in a recent Q&A: "These tools, actually, they're not just searching for product, they're providing the customer with a solution. And when you provide the customer with a solution and better interaction, you actually get larger transaction sizes because people buy more."
The results are showing up in the financials. Kmart Group's digital sales — including marketplace gross merchandise value — grew 19.7% in the second half of FY26, with digital now representing 10.5% of the group's $11.75 billion in total sales. Monthly active app users exceeded 1.6 million, with those users spending 2.4 times the average customer.
Six weeks from zero to live
Perhaps the most instructive detail for other businesses is the speed. Bunnings CIO Genevieve Elliott told the Google Cloud Summit Sydney that Buddy went from concept to live deployment in just over six weeks — replacing the existing website chat. "We launched Buddy in just over six weeks, showing the power of our teams working with Google while replacing that website platform," Elliott said.
That timeline was possible because Bunnings had already laid the groundwork. The company spent five years incorporating AI into personalisation, marketing, and operations. But Elliott was clear that generative AI capability had "accelerated significantly over the past 18 months." The shift wasn't from nothing to everything — it was from years of foundation work to a rapid deployment when the platform technology caught up.
This echoes a pattern we've seen elsewhere in Australian enterprise AI. Macquarie Bank's Gemini deployment recovered 130,000 hours in seven months with 80% daily usage — also built on prior groundwork. The businesses moving fastest with AI agents aren't the ones starting from scratch. They're the ones who did the unglamorous data and infrastructure work years ago.
Where Wesfarmers sits in the Australian retail AI race
Wesfarmers is not the only Australian retailer investing in agentic commerce, but it's the furthest along. Woolworths has upgraded its chatbot Olive into an agentic shopping companion that plans meals, builds baskets, and hunts for cheaper swaps — also built on Google Cloud's Gemini. Coles, meanwhile, signed a five-year partnership with Microsoft and has deployed an internal AI assistant called mycoles to its 115,000 staff, but hasn't launched a customer-facing shopping agent yet.
The competitive dynamics are clear. As ABC News reported, during their full-year results presentations "all major retailers earmarked 'agentic commerce' as a key space to invest in." But analyst Bill Rigby cautioned that it will take at least three years before agentic shopping becomes standard practice in Australia, noting the technology is expensive and "nobody here is letting an agent complete a grocery shop unsupervised at any scale."
That scepticism is fair for grocery. But Wesfarmers' portfolio — hardware, homewares, office supplies — is arguably better suited to agentic commerce than fresh food. A customer asking Buddy to help them build a deck is a fundamentally different use case from asking an AI to pick their avocados. The project-based, multi-product nature of Bunnings shopping is exactly where solution-selling agents shine.
What to watch
Wesfarmers is already expanding. Elliott confirmed that Buddy will launch in New Zealand later this year and will be integrated into individual product pages on the Bunnings website. More significantly, the underlying GECX technology is being extended to trade and commercial customers through the PowerPass app — a segment where AI-assisted procurement could deliver even larger basket sizes.
There's also the Google AI Mode channel to consider. Bunnings is already selling through Google's AI Mode, meaning customers arriving via agentic search are converting at higher rates with larger baskets. As Orange AI noted, this points at a structural shift: "increasingly, the 'customer' arriving at your digital shopfront will be an AI agent shopping on a human's behalf."
For businesses watching from the outside, the lesson from Wesfarmers isn't "spend millions on AI agents." It's more specific than that. Buddy was scoped to a bounded problem — helping customers plan and complete projects — measured against a clear commercial baseline, and expanded only after the evidence arrived. As Google Cloud's Bunnings case study puts it, "this early success is just the beginning."
The evidence has arrived. What matters now is what everyone else does with it.
Sources
- Bunnings Bets on Agents and Saves Half a Million Hours — Information & Data Manager
- Bunnings Group Limited case study — Google Cloud
- Meet Buddy: the Bunnings expert making D.I.Y. easier from home — Bunnings Media Centre
- 2026 Full-year results — Wesfarmers (ASX filing)
- Bunnings turns agentic focus to trade and commercial customers — iTnews
- Wesfarmers to deploy agentic AI groupwide — iTnews
- Bunnings expands AI strategy with Google Cloud-powered Buddy — retailbiz
- AI chatbots like Buddy at Bunnings years from becoming norm for shoppers — ABC News
- Bunnings Doubled Online Conversion. Pay Attention — Orange AI
- Woolworths' Olive grows up, from refund bot to agentic shopping companion — iTWire
