Ashish Gupta, VP/GM of Merchant Shopping at Google: UCP Deep Dive, Nerding out on Product Data Feeds, the importance of Product-Level Context PLUS Google's Vision for Agentic Commerce.
A conversation with Google’s VP and GM of Merchant Shopping on UCP, discovery, product data, AI shopping behavior, and what retailers need to do now to stay visible in agentic commerce.
Google - Welcome to Retailgentic!
Buckle up Retailgentic’ers, we have a big one for you today!
In this episode, we sit down with Ashish Gupta, Vice President and General Manager for Merchant Shopping at Google and Engineering Fellow at Google, where he shapes technical strategy across both ads and commerce. Over two decades at Google, he has worked on some of the company’s most complex large-scale systems, from data infrastructure and ad systems to YouTube Ads and now Agentic Commerce via UCP.
That mix of deep technical leadership and operational responsibility makes Ashish uniquely positioned to explain how Google is approaching the next phase of commerce: one where AI agents, merchants, and shoppers need a shared infrastructure layer to work together.
Plus, he’s a really fun person to get to know!
Listen/Watch Our Interview:
This episode explores the shift from traditional search and ecommerce flows into a new agentic commerce environment where shoppers are using AI surfaces to discover, compare, and increasingly delegate parts of the buying journey.
Ashish explains what Google was seeing internally that led to the development of UCP, why the protocol was designed to be open and ecosystem-wide, and why the ambition goes far beyond checkout. He also shares how Google is thinking about discovery, conversational product data, merchant readiness, and the long-term role of AI across the shopping journey.
For retailers, brands, marketplaces, and commerce tech teams, this conversation is a helpful window into what Google believes is changing now, and what foundations businesses should be investing in before the market fully shifts.
Highlights
How Google’s large-scale ad and data systems shaped his approach to commerce
Why UCP emerged now, and the two major trends that inspired it
Why Google believes agentic commerce needs an open, ecosystem-wide standard
Why the future of UCP extends far beyond checkout
How discovery is starting to take shape within the protocol
Why richer, more conversational product data matters in AI shopping experiences
What retailers need to do now to improve visibility on AI surfaces
How Google is thinking about the relationship between agentic commerce and advertising
Why agentic commerce is still early, but already moving from concept to reality
Agentic commerce is still early, but this conversation makes one thing clear: the infrastructure decisions being made now will shape who gets discovered, considered, and chosen in the next era of shopping.
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Check out the materials we discuss:
👉 Google’s AI shopping gets simpler with Universal Commerce Protocol updates: https://blog.google/products-and-platforms/products/shopping/ucp-updates
👉 Retailgentic’s announcement:
👉 Retailgentic’s UCP announcement: https://www.retailgentic.com/p/flash-googlenrf-announces-universal
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