The news: Google introduced the Universal Cart, an agentic shopping tool that lets users add products from across Google services—including Search, Gemini, YouTube, and Gmail—into a single cart.

• Once items are added, the Universal Cart works in the background to unearth deals and price drops, offer insights into price history, and alert users when products are back in stock.
• The tool analyzes shoppers’ carts to identify potential issues, such as incompatible computer parts, and suggests alternatives.
• It can also flag relevant credit card or loyalty perks to help customers decide whether to make a purchase, as well as unlock savings.
• Shoppers can check out via Google Pay within the Universal Cart interface or transfer their cart to a merchant’s site to complete the transaction.

These features will be available “soon” from Nike, Sephora, Target, Ulta Beauty, Walmart, Wayfair, and select Shopify merchants, Google said. Universal Cart will roll out in the US through Search and the Gemini app this summer, with YouTube and Gmail launches to follow.

More announcements: Universal Cart is one of a series of AI shopping updates Google announced at I/O. The company plans to expand its Universal Commerce Protocol (UCP) to hotel booking and local food delivery, as well as to YouTube. Google is also preparing to launch its UCP-enabled checkout experience in Canada, Australia, and the UK.

The company also previewed its Agent Payments Protocol, which enables AI agents to carry out purchases on users’ behalf, albeit with strict guardrails to prevent unwanted transactions. Shoppers can specify which brands and products they want as well as their budgets; agents will only complete the purchase if every requirement is met.

Implications for retail: Google has announced agentic shopping updates at a fairly rapid clip, but its ambitions could run up against technical limitations and limited consumer interest. Despite the much-hyped UCP announcement, the native checkout capability is live for a mere handful of retailers. That means even those consumers with an interest in agentic shopping have limited avenues.

At the same time, shoppers are less trusting of tech companies or AI platforms like Google and ChatGPT to carry out end-to-end agentic commerce compared with retailers themselves. Some 25% trust retailer-owned AI tools, compared with 16% for Google and other tech companies, and just 7% for an AI platform like ChatGPT, according to a September Bain survey.

Still, Google’s dominance of traditional search could give it an advantage over other AI platforms. Fifty-nine percent of US digital shoppers consider search engines like Google and Bing a top discovery channel for online shopping, compared with just 12% for AI chat tools, per a November survey by Bizrate Insights.

Ultimately, whether Google’s Universal Cart and other shopping initiatives succeed will depend on whether they can considerably improve the existing ecommerce experience. Google is confident that they do, noting that these tools help shoppers focus on the “fun” part of shopping—discovery and inspiration—and outsource the tedious parts, like scouring the internet for coupons and price monitoring. However, while we expect more than 79 million US consumers to use an AI platform to shop this year, 95% of AI platform-driven ecommerce sales will take place on retailers’ sites, showing that users are not yet ready to cede complete control to AI shopping tools.