Google’s latest announcements bring agentic commerce closer to reality

The sweet spot for AI assistance in ecommerce thus far has been product discovery. But Google’s new Universal Cart lays the groundwork for autonomous buying.

(This article is an excerpt from CTI's Agentic Commerce Landscape Review)

The retail and marketing world has been talking about agentic commerce for well over a year. And, as usual in tech, a lot of the hype is sometimes difficult to square with consumer sentiment.

Yes, shoppers seem increasingly willing to begin their product search in an LLM-powered chat interface, or in a retailer’s intelligent search bar. But surveys show that they are wary of delegating the actual purchase. Only 24% feel comfortable doing so according to Bain & Co. Another survey, by fraud prevention platform Riskified, found 55% of respondents are not comfortable handing over the reins to an AI in the checkout.

This attitude is perhaps unsurprising. Bad actors and fraud prevention often seem locked in an arms race. More sophisticated AI may mean more scammers. And the media has also carried stories of experimental AI going off the rails and acting beyond its purview. So, it’s fair to say the enthusiasm of the big tech companies is matched, for now, by a degree of public cynicism, or at least realism.

However, it takes time for consumers to trust in new ways of doing things. And it’s fairly important to point out that the vast majority of shoppers simply won’t have used an agent to actually complete a purchase, unless they have used Chat GPT’s Instant Checkout (before it was shuttered in March 2026) or Amazon’s ‘Buy for Me’ functionality (more on that later). Consumers may well have enjoyed comparing products from a Shopify merchant within a Chat GPT conversation, but that is still arguably within the realms of search, the first step on the agentic ziggurat.

Amara’s Law states that new tech is often overestimated in the short term and underestimated in the long term. 2027 will perhaps give us a clearer glimpse of how agentic commerce may yet become a foundational part of online retail.

New agentic infrastructure offers promise

Despite current consumer attitudes, the reasons to be bullish about agentic commerce are growing as new infrastructure is developed.

There is a spectrum of potential agentic involvement in online retail. McKinsey calls it the ‘automation curve’.

In the consultancy’s model it progresses as follows:

• ‘programmed convenience’: e..g pre-scheduled refills
• ‘assist’: product research
• ‘assemble’: add to cart
• ‘authorise’: placing orders within guardrails
• ‘autonomise’: predictive/consumer mandated
• ‘networked autonomy’: where agents negotiate and coordinate (e.g. to get you the best broadband renewal).

The exciting thing is that we are seeing more development of the standards and the integration needed higher up this automation curve.

Google’s UCP features expand what’s possible

In May 2026 Google announced a suite of new Universal Commerce Protocol (UCP) features and AI tools. Arguably the most important is Universal Cart, which works across retailers and across Google’s services (meaning you could add a product from one retailer via Search, another via YouTube, another via Gmail and so on). It allows shoppers to build a cart of multiple items and then either complete their purchase on the merchant websites, or within Universal Cart using Google Pay, with the retailers remaining the merchant(s) of record. Launch partners include Nike, Walmart, Ulta Beauty and Shopify merchants such as Fenty.

New ad functionality will allow on the spot purchasing with brands that have integrated UCP (via Direct Offers ads in Search) or those that have integrated product feeds within their Demand Gen campaigns (allowing users to buy via Shopping ads on YouTube).

And further updates to its Agent Payments Protocol (AP2) look set to enable more of that McKinsey-coined ‘autonomise’ functionality as Google can create tamper-proof digital mandates i.e. a permanent record for you and a retailer when you tell an agent to go out and make a purchase for you within certain guardrails. At time of writing, this is coming soon to Gemini Spark, Google’s new personal AI agent, designed to help users organise their lives.

All in all, UCP and Google now look set to move forward with a framework that allows for identity linking, loyalty, real-time catalogue retrieval, multi-item checkout and autonomous payments.

This could effectively be day dot for agentic commerce.