Read Sundar Pichai’s remarks at the 2026 National Retail Federation

Building a new chapter of retail

What we’ve learned from the last 27 years of working with retailers is that we only succeed together.

Our goal is to build a future of retail where the opportunity space expands for everyone. One where customers can use Google products they love as part of a seamless shopping experience. A future where you are able to build strong relationships with your customers that long outlast any single search or purchase.

AI can help at every step, from discovery and decision to delivery and everything else that goes into creating a full customer experience. Let’s focus on discovery and decision.

Improving product discovery on our platforms

Google Search has always been an important starting point for shopping on the web. Since 2021, our Shopping Graph provides information on products in real time. It has over 50 billion product listings, including inventory, prices and reviews. More than 2 billion of those listings are refreshed every single hour. It’s information at the speed of retail.

Now, with AI Mode, we’re seeing these journeys move from keywords to natural conversations. It’s a fundamental shift. While you once had to sort through pages of results, AI can do the hard work of narrowing down exactly what you’re most interested in buying.

And last year, we brought the Shopping Graph to the Gemini app, so it’s a lot more helpful for people asking shopping-related questions, too.

Introducing a new protocol for agentic commerce

For many people, discovery is the fun part of shopping. Making a decision is where things get harder. As an indecisive shopper myself, I’m looking forward to the day when agents can help me get from discovery to purchase.

At Google, we’re busy laying the groundwork for this agentic ecosystem to work well. That includes building a common language for these systems and services to talk to each other.

As a next step we are introducing the Universal Commerce Protocol (UCP), designed for the era of agentic commerce. It was built to meet the needs of retailers AND customers, keeping the full customer relationship front and center — from the moments of discovery to decision and beyond.

It’s open, agnostic, built together with industry leaders Shopify, Etsy, Wayfair, Target and Walmart, and endorsed by 20+ more.

Importantly, UCP is compatible with existing industry protocols like, Agent2Agent, the Agent Payments Protocol, and Model Context Protocol. It’s also built to work across verticals. And it’s available starting today.

You might wonder why we’re introducing another protocol. The industry needs a protocol that works at global scale and takes into account the nuances of commerce journeys, and this is a critical building block for it.