🚨FLASH: Google Launches Universal Cart and More at Google I/O - First to Reach "Level 4: Advanced Buy" On the Retailgentic Agentic Commerce Autonomy Scale

Has ChatGPT made a strategic error and completed ceded Agentic Commerce to Google? how will they, Copilot and META respond? Google turns up the heat at Google I/O and we're there live!

Greetings LIVE From Google I/O!

Greetings from sunny Mountain View California where we’re all waiting here for the big keynotes and other festivities to kick off. Google I/O is foreign to us in the Retail/Brand world because it’s a developer conference for super hard core cracked devs. Well, guess what, AI is mashing up all our Worlds and here I am for the first time at one of the largest developer conferences out there. Later in the day I’ll be posting some pics and video to show you the scale of this thing. It’s a scale that I haven’t seen since the late 90’s Microsoft Visual C++ days and the engineers here are in a Agentic AI induced frenzy.

This year Google is smooshing together their Ad conference, Google Marketing Live (GML) . Today, Tuesday May 19, one of the top topics at the keynote (I’m sure we’ll get new models and there’s an OpenClaw-ish agent called Spark coming that we’ll cover in another post later) and then Agentic Commerce takes the main stage. Then Tomorrow, Wed May 20th we go to GML

It will be two days chock full of announcements, live demos and we’ve secured some killer ✨EXCLUSIVE✨ interviews for Retailgentic readers that we will post as fast as we can. Because of this our posting frequency this week will be quite unusual, but we want to keep our reputation of getting you the fastest and deepest Agentic Commerce news so you have an edge.

Today we had advanced release of the biggest feature coming out today: Universal Cart.

Note this is not live today - they are saying: “Rolling out this Summer”. But we’re going to see live demos, so I’m thinking ‘early Summer.” - a question I’ll be definitely digging into for you.

Google Universal Cart: Intelligent, Proactive, Multi-dimensional, Multi-item, Multi-merchant Delivers “Agentic Superpowers for Shoppers”

There’s a lot to unpack here, let’s start with a list of all the features in the new Universal Cart and then I’ll show you examples. We’ve talked about the idea of Universal Carts back in January when we found evidence that ChatGPT was about to release theirs here. The TL;DR - before Agentic Commerce many tried, all failed. Google has 100% nailed it by building it on UCP.

Google’s Universal Cart (GUC) features:

• Multi-item - Agentic Commerce carts to-date have been single item single cart. GUC is multi-item - in fact it’s kind of a ‘lazy cart’ - you can throw stuff in there as you shop as almost a wait list and then checkout at your leisure. It’s persistent and follows you across devices and sessions. Almost like your shopping buddy - always there for you to sling it a product, hold it there and it will keep it safe for you and help you proactively.

• Multi-merchant - GUC is multi merchant. Working on a new outfit for a Summer trip across 5 retailers, throw it all in one cart and see it all together.

• Intelligent - Once you add an item to the cart, it can tell you about the price history of that product, if that product is frequently out of stock (‘hey you may want to check out now’), etc.

• Proactive - Let’s say you new Macbook Neo in your cart and you get a webcam too. GUC will check the compatibility, noticed that the webcam is USB2 and Neo doesn’t have a port for that and flag the incompatibility.

• Multi-dimensional -In addition to the above, it is aware of your wallet. I am a big Amex user and they have great offers and other discounts and cash back/points multipliers that are near impossible to use because they are locked at amex.com - they should be at the point of purchase, now they can be. GUC will surface these things when it detects them. Previously Google also announced partnership with our friends at Klarna and Affirm for BNPL, so that’s another dimension you can leverage here.

• Multi-surface - This is going to be live across not only AI mode and Gemini, but also Gmail and Youtube.

• Merchant friendly - Through all of this it maintains merchant-of-record and I imagine soon we’ll get loyalty program connectivity (this is part of UCP, Copilot has implemented it, Google hasn’t yet, seems like they wanted to nail cart first - this is going to be my top question I ask).

Before we get into some examples, we have an important Retailgentic ‘Agentic Commerce Players” update.

Agentic Commerce Levels of Autonomy Update

While it’s only Q2 and early at that, we’re going to make a mid-year update to our tracker:

Updates:

• ChatGPT: Down a level ☹️ - First, we have to move ChatGPT from Level-3: “Buy” back down to “Level-2: Find” - yes they have ChatGPT apps, but that experience is so terrible, we couldn’t live with ourselves having it in the same category as obviously superior offerings. ChatGPT - there’s still time to get back in this thing - wake up!

• Gemini: Up a level 😄 - We’re also calling it- with the announcement of GUC, we’re “3.0’ing” Google/Gemini and moving them as the first competitor to reach Level-4: “Advanced Buy”. We would have liked to see Loyalty in there, but we all know it’s on the docket, so we’re going ahead and moving them as the mountain of other features really fulfill our vision of what “Advanced Buy” could look like when we first published this in early 2025.

Now, let’s dig into some examples and bring this to life.

Note: these are static images provided by Google, I’ll be posting more when we get into the live demo/hands on parts of the days.

Example 1: Multi-Item and Multi-Merchant

Here we see a lot going on - we’ve got two merchants, Target and Ulta - in the Target part we have two items from Target a hat and a gardening kit - both are 5% off (presumably with a coupon or red circle?). Notice the new ‘checkout option’ where you can buy via UCP or xfer the cart over to Target.com

Then we have Ulta - we can only see one item, but it could be 100. All multi-item shipping discounts and what-not are detected and applied here exactly as they would be in the downstream cart.

Example 2: Intelligent

In this example, GUC has 2 products from Wayfair and tells us this desk is a pretty good deal and this would be an opportune time to buy this puppy before that price creeps up (it’s at a 30 day low).

Example 3: Proactive

Here we see two proactive vignettes:

• Vignette 1 - We’re building a gaming PC at Bestbuy throw some components in the cart and it detects an incompatibility.

• Vignette 2 - We have 2 items in our cart and there’s a discount with our Target Circle Credit card (ah-ha!)

Example 4: Multi-dimensional

By ‘multi-dimensional’ - what I mean is it cares more about price. Other dimensions important to me as a shopper are: speed of delivery, price of delivery, stock level, price trend, payment method discounts/special offers, price trend, etc. GUC is pulling all of this in and it’s already smart and will only get smarter.

What’s Next…

Later today I’m going to be posting some thoughts at the end of the day and then we’ll be back at it tomorrow at GML with some early interviews coming your way too as we produce them.

Happy Agentic Commercing! 🚀

Bonus - here’s the map of cool stuff I’ll have access to later today. It’s like a theme park for nerds LET’S GO! 🤓🤓🤓🤓🤓