On January 14, 2026, Google took another bold stride into the future of retail by unveiling a sweeping suite of AI-powered shopping innovations, promising to reshape how consumers and retailers interact across the digital marketplace. The announcements, made at the National Retail Federation (NRF) 2026 event in New York, showcased the tech giant’s ambitious vision for agentic commerce—a model where AI agents manage every step of the customer journey, from product discovery to purchase and support, all within Google’s ever-expanding ecosystem.
At the heart of this transformation is Google’s Gemini Enterprise for Customer Experience (CX), a unified platform designed to integrate shopping and customer service for retailers and restaurants. As reported by CMSWire, the platform leverages prebuilt and configurable AI agents developed with Google’s advanced Gemini models. These agents, Google says, can be deployed in days and orchestrate the entire customer lifecycle, handling everything from natural-language product searches to post-purchase support.
Retailers are already lining up to participate. Kroger, Lowe’s, and Woolworths Group announced plans to adopt Gemini Enterprise, hoping to deliver more personalized support and streamline the customer journey. Seemantini Godbole, chief digital and information officer at Lowe’s, explained, “With Gemini Enterprise for Customer Experience, we are enhancing our AI-powered home improvement advisor, Mylow, to provide guidance personalized to a customer’s home, their project, and where they live, bringing new levels of confidence to every decision.”
Google’s CEO Sundar Pichai underscored the scale and ambition of the project during his NRF remarks. He described retail as a “front-line industry in what he calls an ‘AI platform shift,’” arguing that the next phase of digital commerce will be defined by agents that move customers seamlessly from discovery to decision to purchase. Pichai highlighted the rapid adoption of Google’s AI technologies, noting that Google Cloud Vertex AI processed 8.3 trillion tokens in December 2024 and over 90 trillion tokens a year later—an astonishing 11-fold increase in just twelve months.
Central to Google’s strategy is the Shopping Graph, which Pichai called “foundational infrastructure for AI-driven retail journeys.” The Shopping Graph now features over 50 billion product listings, with more than 2 billion updated every hour. Pichai emphasized that AI Mode is shifting shopping away from keyword searches toward “natural conversations,” where the technology narrows options and reduces the effort required to evaluate products. He noted, “AI can help at every step, from discovery and decision to delivery and everything else that goes into creating a full customer experience.”
But perhaps the most significant technical leap is the introduction of the Universal Commerce Protocol (UCP). Unveiled on January 12, 2026, UCP is an open-source standard co-developed with major brands like Shopify, Etsy, Wayfair, Target, and Walmart, and already endorsed by more than 20 other industry leaders including Adyen, American Express, Best Buy, Flipkart, Macy’s Inc., Mastercard, Stripe, The Home Depot, Visa, and Zalando. According to Econsultancy, UCP allows AI agents and systems to operate together across consumer surfaces, businesses, and payment providers, creating a “common language” for agentic commerce.
For consumers, this means the ability to pay for goods from eligible US-based retailers directly while researching on Google—without ever leaving the platform. Retailers, meanwhile, remain the seller of record and can customize the integration to their needs, helping to capture sales and reduce abandoned carts. Google plans to expand UCP globally and add features such as discovering related products, applying loyalty rewards, and powering custom shopping experiences on its surfaces.
The innovations don’t stop there. Google also debuted Business Agent, a tool for retailers to help shoppers interact without leaving Google Search. Launch partners included Lowe’s, Michael’s, Poshmark, and Reebok. Retailers can activate and customize their Business Agent in Merchant Center, and soon will be able to train it based on their data, access new customer insights, provide offers for related products, and enable direct purchases—including agentic checkout—within the experience.
Completing the trifecta, Google announced Direct Offers, a new Google Ads pilot that enables advertisers to present exclusive deals to shoppers ready to buy directly in AI Mode. Early collaborators include Petco, e.l.f. Cosmetics, Samsonite, Rugs USA, and Shopify merchants. Google said, “We are initially focusing on discounts for the pilot and will expand to support the creation of offers with other attributes that help shoppers prioritize value over price alone, such as bundles and free shipping.”
For retailers, the implications are profound. As noted by customer experience and AI strategy advisor Julia Ahfeldt in CX Network, “2026 will mark a ‘seismic shift’ in consumer adoption of generative and agentic AI.” She cited over 800 million weekly ChatGPT users, with rapid growth in developing markets, as evidence that “the era of generative AI-driven discovery has begun, and few brands are truly ready for it.”
Google’s new agentic commerce tools are already changing discoverability. The company is enabling “dozens of new data attributes in Merchant Center” to support “easy discovery in the conversational commerce era,” covering surfaces like AI Mode, Gemini, and Business Agent. These attributes go beyond traditional keywords to include answers to common product questions, compatible accessories, or substitutes. Google said it will begin testing the features with a small group of retailers before expanding in the coming months.
The impact on the retail sector is likely to be far-reaching. During Cyber Week 2025, AI agents influenced 20% of all orders, accounting for $67 billion in global sales. Retailers deploying branded AI agents grew sales 32% faster than competitors in 2025, according to CMSWire. Organizations implementing autonomous AI systems reported a 28% improvement in issue resolution time and a 19% increase in first-contact resolution rates.
Yet, as Econsultancy points out, there are potential downsides. Google’s history of keeping users within its ecosystem has already disrupted news, advertising, and other industries. Some experts warn that these changes could further erode retailer margins, undermine loyalty programs, and shift even more power to the tech giant. The debate is sure to intensify as Google expands these capabilities globally.
Meanwhile, Google’s financial performance remains robust. Alphabet posted its first-ever $100 billion revenue quarter in Q3 2025, with Google Cloud growing 34% to $15.2 billion. The company closed 2025 with the release of Gemini 3, featuring enhanced reasoning and a 1 million-token context window, which fueled a 65% stock rally and pushed Alphabet’s market cap to nearly $4 trillion. Regulatory pressures, however, loom large, with a U.S. federal judge barring Google from exclusive search deals and the European Commission levying a €2.95 billion fine over ad-tech practices.
As Google’s agentic commerce strategy gains momentum, the company is also expanding its logistics reach. Wing, Google’s drone delivery partner, and Walmart doubled their deliveries in 2025 and are set to expand to Houston and other U.S. cities in early 2026. The future of retail, it seems, will be shaped by algorithms, drones, and a relentless drive to keep customers—and their data—within Google’s digital walls.
With the reunification of creative minds like Kasia Canning and Estefanio Holtz, best known for launching Google’s Black-Owned Friday, as co-ECDs, Google is signaling a renewed focus on inclusive and innovative marketing as it embarks on this new era of commerce. The coming months will reveal whether retailers and consumers alike are ready to embrace this agentic future—or whether the balance of power in retail will tip even further toward the Silicon Valley giant.
