The Google logo displayed on your phone next to your shopping cart.
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As retailers increasingly turn to artificial intelligence tools to lure shoppers and run critical parts of their businesses, google We want to make sure it’s at the center of the action.
At the kickoff of the National Retail Federation’s annual trade show on Sunday, Google announced the launch of what it calls the Universal Commerce Protocol. The company hopes UCP will become an industry standard for retailers to use for AI agents and systems across tasks such as discovery, purchasing, and “post-purchase support.”
Google says the open source protocol creates a unified system across the shopping experience, from search to payment, eliminating the need for retailers to build their own tools and connect disparate features.
“It’s really important to have a standardized way to scale this up and make sure everyone is prepared for all the different steps that are going to come,” Vidya Srinivasan, Google’s vice president of advertising and commerce, said in an interview. “It gives businesses flexibility because they can choose what they need.”
E-commerce has emerged as one of the key battlegrounds in the burgeoning generative AI market, with Google leading the way with OpenAI, Perplexity, and Amazonthey are all trying to get consumers to start their shopping journey by using different apps and services.
In September, OpenAI announced Instant Checkout, which allows users to purchase some products through ChatGPT, and collects fees from transactions it helps reconcile. OpenAI’s Agentic Commerce Protocol, developed in partnership with Stripe, is open source and may conflict with UCP.
In May, Perplexity announced it was partnering with PayPal to allow users to buy products, book travel, and secure concert tickets directly within chat without leaving the platform, and in November it announced it would roll out a free proxy shopping product for users in the U.S. ahead of the holiday season.
And early last year, Amazon launched Shop Direct, a feature that allows consumers to browse products from other brands’ sites on Amazon. Some of these products include a button labeled “Buy for Me,” an AI agent that can buy products from other websites on a shopper’s behalf.
AI-powered tools and agent commerce could create a $3 trillion to $5 trillion opportunity for retail markets globally by 2030, according to an October McKinsey report.
Google said UCP was co-developed with the following companies: Shopify, Etsy, wayfair and target. The protocol will soon power a new checkout feature that will allow users to make purchases directly from Google’s AI mode or the Gemini app. You can also pay via Google Wallet, but Srinivasan said he plans to introduce other payment methods such as PayPal in the future.
Srinivasan said UCP is compatible with other existing protocols.
As part of Sunday’s announcement, Google also introduced a feature called “Business Agents” that allows shoppers to chat with brands.
“This is to address new consumer behaviors that are moving towards more conversational commerce,” Srinivasan said. “We want to give retailers the ability to connect with users on our surfaces and using their voice.”
Then there’s advertising, which is Google’s core market.
Google said it is testing “direct offers” that would allow retailers to promote unique discounts, such as 20% off a product, if a user of its AI-mode chatbot expresses an intention to buy something.
“Our role in the ecosystem is to be a matchmaker, and one way we do that is through advertising,” Srinivasan said. “Innovating in areas that add value to both retailers and buyers is a huge focus for us.”
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