Google is making its play to lead agentic AI commerce across its units as it combines AI Mode commerce features and agents with a new end-to-end commerce protocol and Google Cloud's Gemini Enterprise for Customer Experience.
Google launched Universal Commerce Protocol (UCP), a standard for agentic AI commerce, checkout directly through AI mode along with direct offers and interactions to connect brands and shoppers. Google Cloud also unveiled Gemini Enterprise for Customer Experience, a suite that includes a shopping agent, customer experience agent studio, Vertex AI powered search and food ordering agent.
The announcements, timed for the National Retail Federations 2026 conference, add up to Google providing various tools to enable agentic commerce in multiple forms with a unified platform.
In a nutshell, Google is looking to offer tools to enable shopping across the customer journey. Carrie Tharp, VP of Global Solutions and Industries at Google Cloud, said AI is moving from a passive tool to one that's more active and autonomous.
"Agents can execute complex, multi-step, prescriptive actions across every consumer and operational touch point, and every retailer now has the opportunity to bring their value proposition to life in fundamentally new ways through these agentic experiences," said Tharp. "Most retailers are still in the early days of evolving discovery and the modern customer journey is very fragmented with shoppers jumping between apps, search and physical aisles because legacy systems don't talk to each other. This is simple. AI isn't retailers' competition. It should be their superpower. We believe AI must serve retailers and shoppers alike."
Although Google faces plenty of commerce competition from OpenAI, Microsoft, Amazon and a bevy of others, the company does occupy a unique position given that it touches nearly every part of the retail budget from marketing and demand to back-end functions via Google Cloud.
Here's a breakdown of what Google announced at NRF 2026.
Universal Commerce Protocol (UCP)
UCP is designed to be an open standards for agentic commerce that works across the entire shopping journey from discovery and buying to post purchase support.
Vidhya Srinivasan, VP and GM of Ads and Commerce at Google, said UCP "sits between agentic experiences with consumer services on one hand and the business back-end on the other." She added that UCP is built to walk across industries and is compatible with Model Context Protocol, Agent2Agent and Agentic Payments Protocol.
UCP is supported by 20 retail and commerce players including Shopify, Etsy, Wayfair, Target, Best Buy, PayPal, Visa, Stripe and American Express.
Srinivasan said UCP will power a new checkout feature in Google's AI Mode and in search, but the company will add more partners and capabilities including discovering related products and applying loyalty rewards.
Shopify's Vanessa Lee, VP of Product, said UCP is designed to address more seamless checkouts.
"Checkouts are simple from a consumer perspective and we put a lot of energy and work as retailers and platforms to make that checkout experience seamless," she said. "But one of the things that we did with UCP was we wanted to acknowledge that there's actually a lot of work that goes on behind the scenes to make that checkout as seamless as possible. One thing that we learned over the last two decades was that every single checkout is unique, and we want agentic shopping to not just be for a subset of checkouts. We wanted it to be for ubiquitous across all of shopping."
UCP sets up a series of new agentic shopping features from Google.
Business Agent, Direct Offers
Google is launching Brand Agent as a headliner of a set of agentic commerce features and tools.
The company launched Business Agent, which chats and answers questions about retailers within a search. "One way to think about it is think it's think of it as a virtual sales associate that can just answer product questions in the brand's voice during those critical shopping moments, so that the retailers can just help drive sales," said Srinivasan.
Business Agent is live with anchor retailers including Lowe's, Poshmark and Reebok. In the months ahead, retailers will be able to train agents with their own data and insights and enable direct purchases in AI Mode.
Google also announced multiple new attributes in its Merchant Center to improve discovery in AI Mode and Gemini. "These new attributes complement retailers' existing data feeds, and they go beyond the traditional keywords to include things like answers to common product questions, things like compatible accessories or even substitutes. We'll be rolling these out to a set a group of retailers soon, with plans to expand in the coming months," said Srinivasan.
The company is also launching a new ads pilot called Direct Offers, which moves beyond traditional ads and targets people shopping in AI Mode. Free shipping, bundles and special deals would be included in Direct Offers. Shopify merchants, Rugs USA, e.l.f. Cosmetics, Petco and Samsonite are piloting Direct Offers.
Checkout in AI Mode is available through Google Pay.
Google Cloud Gemini Enterprise for Customer Experience
The company said the company's launch of Google Cloud Gemini Enterprise for Customer Experience is designed to give retailers the ability to build agents for retailers that maintain brand voice at every interaction across channels.
"These agents are not just for answering questions. They can inform the customer about inventory availability, guide them through order processing, suggest products they love, and handle a return seamlessly. Every touch point becomes an opportunity to delight and drive more business," said Darshan Kantak, VP of Product, Applied AI at Google Cloud.
The shopping agents in Gemini Enterprise for Customer Experience can carry out complex reasoning, multimodal interactions and execute actions. Papa John's Kevin Vasconi, Chief Digital and Technology Officer, said 85% of the company's orders are digital and the goal is to remove friction from the purchase.
Vasconi quipped that buying pizza isn't considered to be stressful unless you're ordering for your child's travel soccer team and navigating preferences and dietary restrictions.
"We're always thinking about how we turn a transaction into a personal experience. Not everybody has a personal shopper and we think this is a beautiful application of multimodal AI. We're trying to figure out how do we take the friction out of the experience. As good as it is, there's still a lot of friction in the experience," said Vasconi.
Google Cloud Gemini Enterprise for Customer Experience follows an emerging Google Cloud playbook as Gemini Enterprise is being rolled out to multiple verticals.
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"Think of it as an ecosystem of smart, interconnected agents that are orchestrated to understand reason and to take action. It enables businesses to drive that high touch premium service from initial product discovery to post purchase resolution, while maintaining continuous context across each of the touch points," said Kantak. "When a retailer uses this technology, the AI experience belongs to them. It's built for their brand in their persona."
Gemini Enterprise for Customer Experience is also multimodal to handle images, video and voice as well as text. Kantak said Kroger and Lowe's are launch customers.
Kroger's Yael Cosset, SVP and Chief Digital Officer, said the grocer has a rich data set that can leverage agentic AI to tailor offers, make recommendation and give customers time back. "Consumers want to eat more at home, but have lack of time for the complexity and how overwhelming it can be to plan and ultimately shop for their groceries," he said. "The shopping companion Google is going to allow us to develop and roll out features that will alleviate that complexity. Agentic commerce is going to be a huge unlock to accelerate that emotional connection with the customer."
The company also launched a Customer Experience Agent Studio where customers can upload transcripts, products and product information and an agent builds another one and evaluates quality. Monitoring is also built in.
Kantak added that Google Cloud is also looking to connect human agents and AI agents with two new customer service tools--AI Coach and AI Trainer. AI Coach provides real-time guidance to human reps and AI Trainer speeds up onboarding.
Other additions include:
- Discovery Engine, which uncovers service trends with natural language queries.
- Quality AI, which is a system that understands every conversation happening, creates insights and scorecards.
- Food Agent, which is part of the Google Cloud Gemini Enterprise for Customer Experience suite, and can enable voice ordering across kiosks, drive throughs and car dashboards. The Food Agent will also have the ability to upsell and automate processes. Papa John's is a launch customer.
