Google’s announcement will change shopping as we know iI.
Courtesy of Brainlabs
Google recently announced the launch of Universal Commerce Protocol, a new infrastructure that will enable seamless AI-powered shopping, Native Checkout across AI surfaces, Business Agent in Search and a Direct Offers pilot. Basically, what Google has done is establish a standard protocol for how brands are positioning themselves with AI as the protocol layer between consumers, retailers, and payment systems.
Today, these are the early stages of AI agents being the place customers are starting to go in order to do their e-commerce shopping search. Agentic commerce is able to be much more highly personalized because it has all the information from richer search requests.
AI shopping agents are reshaping digital commerce, autonomously influencing consumer purchasing decisions, and redefining online shopping transactions. With agentic AI, retailers can now provide information and serve up the products that consumers need in the language of consumers. Experts believe UPC is a game-changer for agentic AI shopping.
Amazon is building walls and other AI giants are trying to launch their own agentic commerce plays. PayPal launched its Agentic Toolkit and Visa and Mastercard are racing to develop payment tools that enable AI agents to make purchases on behalf of customers. Visa introduced Intelligent Commerce and Mastercard debuted Agent Pay.
Meanwhile, with VGS mearchants and AI companies can unlock PCI-compliant, secure and portable VGS tokens that are built to transmit sensitive data and process secure transactions on behalf of customers and agents.
These measures pale in comparison to Google’s UCP.
Brainlabs, which manages the search programmatic, paid social and influencer marketing for global brands, said Universal Commerce Protocol is establishing a protocol that any AI solution and ChatGPT can use. “We think that UCP puts Google ahead of the curve,” said Jeremy Hull, chief solutions officer, at Brainlabs. “This is an example of a rising tide lifting all boats. It will benefit folks other than Google, which has several other pieces of the puzzle already moving. It’s one element that’s in lockstep with everything they’re trying to do around AI. It takes all of the other things and makes them work a little better.”
“It’s laying the framework of how AI is going to impact shopping in the future,” Liz DeAngelis, managing director programmatic and media at Brainlabs, said of Google. “It’s a great first step. I like the way they included retailers in the beginning, and the idea of integrating so many retailers in a unified approach. It’s more inclusive that just saying, ‘Get on board.’”
Google partnered with Shopify, Etsy, Wayfair, Target and Walmart to create a shared language for AI agents across the shopping journey to create more consistent and reliable AI responses to consumer prompts and a stronger data foundation for retailers and platforms.
Google is creating a foundational language that’s intentionally unsexy and uncomplicated for a reason. “It’s meant to be the future infrastructure of how we’re going to shop,” said Dan Connor managing partner, Brainlabs. “I see they’re confining it to a single item at checkout to start slow. This is a new way people translate their behavior and the way people are using LLMs [large language models] to start discovering.
“A lot of consumers will see upfront transparency and expect that,” Connor added. “There’s a balancing act with removing friction overall. Consumers leaning in to this are well aware of what personalization brings to them. They’re using agents in the customer service space. It’s a more natural behavior than we may think.”
Connor said a lot of the success of UCP will come down to timing. If retailers get the timing wrong it can make the process feel invasive, he said. “If I’m not even shopping and it starts predicting and pushing me in the moment when I’m not even shopping, I’ll resent that,” Connor said. “Then, when I’m actually ready to buy, but I don’t have time to source the pricing, it’s that weird on the fence of intent that it’s going to start figuring out.”
Connor pointed out that these are early days for Google and UCP. “We’re going to build behavior and trust really fast to understand how to get these baskets accurate.,” he said. “That’s going to be the core learning phase. As soon as we get bigger baskets, it’s going to scale from there. This could be a whole new interesting evolution. It gives them an additional data point as they start to build out household and audience profiles.”
Who owns the customer at the end of the day, when it comes to native checkout? “We’re handing it to the end merchants and most of that comes through the post-purchase experience,” Connor said. “I’m very optimistic about the intent you might have missed. But you’re still owning and responsible for the after care of that consumer relationship.”
“It you want to be discoverable by Google,” Connor added, ”the biggest retailers will force the conversation. Then it’s ultimately going to come down to unseen is unsold in the game of retail. As more consumer behavior and shopping behavior moves this way, it’s going to be the tipping point of following the demand.”
While Universal Commerce Protocol will also benefit ChatGPT, Google is already ahead of the curve on universal checkout. Google is gambling that its UCP will be a better user experience. “I think at this point it would be a fool’s errand for someone to set up a competing protocol because in theory, a brand could adhere to any number of protocols, but it’s duplicative work,” Hull said.