🚨FLASH: Google@NRF Announces: Universal Commerce Protocol, Checkout, and Direct Offers and Much, Much More.🚨
As predicted, Google goes 'all in' on Agentic Commerce at NRF with a flood of new announcements. We have the tea 🫖, come on in and we'll take you through it.
In our 11 Agentic Commerce Predictions for 2026 post just 4 days ago, we predicted that Google would make a big move at NRF and that the Sundar/Furner keynote was signaling something major. We predicted “Google Agentic 2.0” - meaning an elevated checkout experience beyond the ‘Buy for me’ ‘Google Agentic 1.0’ but what they delivered goes WAY beyond that.
Programming note: Simultaneous to this detailed post, we are releasing an audio and video podcast if you prefer to learn about the news that way it has extended coverage.
Audio podcast is here (scroll down to ‘Latest Episodes’) and the Video with accompanying presentation is at the top of your YouTube Channel here. That’s a great opportunity to remind you to subscribe there as well. At the end of this post you will find a downloadable PDF as a resource for you should you need to present about these big moves by Google at your company.
Let’s jump into the details→
Summary of all the Announcements
There were so many announcements, I’ve put them into 4 categories:
Google Agentic Shopping Announcements from the Google Ads+Commerce Group (This is our focus area)
Walmart + Google Wing expansion
Google Cloud (B2B Offerings) Agentic Commerce offerings for Retailers (on-site)
Customer case studies (mostly of Google Cloud pieces)
Given our focus at Retailgentic on consumer-facing Agentic Commerce, we’re going to focus on the details of the Agentic commerce and Wing pieces and we’ll hit the highlights of the B2B announcements and customer case studies.
Google’s Five Big Consumer Agentic Commerce Announcements
The five big announcements in our world are:
Universal Commerce Protocol (UCP) - A new OPEN standard for agentic commerce.
New Checkout Feature - Built on the new UCP, Google releases an enhanced checkout capability that is at parity with ACP/Instant Checkout and addresses the serious pitfalls in the first ‘Buy for me’ implementation of Agentic Checkout.
Expanded Product Catalog Feed - To me, this is the least flashy, but will end up being the most important of all this news.
Direct Offers - A new AI/Agentic ad unit is born.
Business Agent - You can deploy a shopping agent live on a merchant-oriented landing page right in the Google Agentic Shopping experience that uses your Extended Product Catalog Feed and some other inputs the retailer can provide.
Universal Commerce Protocol (UCP) - Did Google Just End the Protocol Wars?
In our 2026 predictions, we talked about a “high ground strategy” where someone connects ACP, AP2, and MCP together and builds the “one protocol to rule them all.”
Google just did exactly that….🤯….in the second week of 2026!! 🤯🤯
Here’s their architecture diagram→
UCP creates a common language for agents and systems to operate together across consumer surfaces, businesses, and payment providers. The key here is that instead of requiring unique connections for every individual agent, UCP enables ALL agents to interact easily.
In the diagram there are 6 sub ‘capabilities’ of UDP that are worth calling out. Note that the dotted line boxes are ‘coming soon’ and the solid boxes are ‘launched’.
Product Discovery - No details are provided, but keep reading for the expansion of the Google Shopping Feed Spec, I suspect that will be part of this and then, somewhat akin to the Stripe Agentic Commerce Suite, there will be some part of UCP where you can turn on and off products and agents can ping the protocol to pull product information in a variety of ways.
Cart - This is the most interesting - Google is signaling today that the UCP will enable the holy grail of ecommerce that many have tried and all have failed - the multi-item, cross-merchant, mechant-of-record unified cart system. One cart to rule them all. While I believe ChatGPT/ACP has the same goal, Google is putting it out there with the dotted-line box.
Identity Linking - I imagine this is things like ‘know your agent’, tokenization of cards - like the Link or ShopPay system that if they can match your credentials to a token, they can auto-fill the credit card info for you, etc.
Checkout - We’ll cover in detail.
Order - Once you are checking out customers you need a two sided order UX for both consumers to see orders, cancel, process returns, etc. and the other side is for merchants to pull down orders, process, upload shipping details and handle the other post-purchase processes (returns, review, etc.)
Other Vertical Capabilities - This feels like a ‘catch all’ - no other details were provided. Perhaps it’s for future expansion into categories like auto parts or grocery or b2b. In the news today one of the customers highlighted is Papa Johns so another idea is this could be where a ‘ChatGPT app’ type experience plugs into ‘the side’ of UCP.
Built on a foundation of interoperability
While they don’t exactly call it out, I believe that with this protocol, PSPs and innovative startups will be able to use either that API or MCP connectivity at the bottom to bridge that ‘last inch’ between this system and ACP effectively ‘high grounding’ that protocol. Time will tell, at the speed 2026 is going, this could be coming out next week - I’m, again, befuzzled by how dang fast things are going.
UCP is designed to work with EXISTING protocols - A2A, AP2, AND MCP. This is the ‘high ground’ interoperability play we’ve been predicting, just much sooner than I thought and while Google seemed possible, I thought it would be Stripe/PayPal or Shopify (who did play a role and is on-board it seems).
The Partner List is STACKED
One thing Google, so far, is better at than ChatGPT is putting today a wide array of partners in these launches. Here’s the launch partners, an impressive mix of wallets, payment service providers, and card providers.
On the roster you obviously have Google, but then you can put the others into two buckets:
Retailers/marketplaces: Etsy, Wayfair, Target, Best Buy, Macy’s, Kroger, Home Depot, Gap Inc., Sephora, Ulta, Zalando, Chewy, Carrefour, Flipkart, Shopee
Payments: PayPal, Stripe, Adyen, Visa, Mastercard, American Express, Worldpay
There are three companies in both the UCP and ACP camps worth note: Stripe, PayPal, Shopify, Mastercard, Visa and Amex.
New Checkout - “Buy for Me” Gets a MAJOR Upgrade
Remember our coverage of Google’s “Buy for Me” feature? We documented the “percent-of-a-percent-of-a-percent” problem where you had to be in AI Mode, on a shopping query, with a participating merchant, etc.
That’s getting fixed.
The new checkout feature will appear on eligible Google product listings in AI Mode in Search AND the Gemini app. Here’s what the flow looks like→
Here we see a clean three step flow, no ‘you have to track prices first’ or anything like that, simply Product → Review Order → Order Complete. Clean and simple!
Key details:
PayPal support coming soon (!)
Retailers remain seller of record (merchant-of-record model, just like ACP)
Retailers can customize the integration
Rolling out to US first, expanding globally
This is essentially Google matching ChatGPT’s Instant Checkout capability, but built on top of their new open protocol. The promise is that if you integrate with UCP once, you get distribution across Google’s ecosystem and others that join the UCP party.
Expanded Product Catalog Feed (aka Google Shopping Feed - Agentic Commerce Edition)
Google’s current iteration of Agentic Commerce actually has two problems:
Issues with the original ‘Buy for me’ checkout system
Product Catalog issues.
As we’ve covered here several times and illustrated by the ACP/Instant Checkout ChatGPT datafeed spec, foundational the elevated user experience these LLM-based agentic commerce systems is a dramatically ‘widened’. In fact, here’s a graphic I use to help retailers and brands understand the disparity:
Google Announces ‘Expanded Attributes’ (This is a big deal in our world!)
Unfortunately what I think is the most part of this tactically making this work and what retailers and brands are going to want to know about has the fewest details on announcement day. Here’s what we know→
The way people shop is changing, but our goal remains the same: to help retailers get discovered. That’s why we’re announcing dozens of new data attributes in Merchant Center designed for easy discovery in the conversational commerce era, on surfaces like AI Mode, Gemini and Business Agent. These new attributes complement retailers’ existing data feeds and go beyond traditional keywords to include things like answers to common product questions, compatible accessories or substitutes. We will be rolling these out with a small group of retailers soon and expanding to more in the coming months.
There’s also this slide from a presentation that hints at more→
I’m reading between the lines, but translating Google corporate speak to English I get:
Dozens - 24-60 new attributes
Merchant Center - This infers there will be some new feed spec or new attributes added to the existing Google Shopping Feed spec (most likely IMHO) and that feed, just like your current Google Shopping Feed, will be uploaded to Google via the Merchant Center.
Examples - The examples they give us are: Q+A (like ChatGPT) plus recommended accessories and substitute, compatibility information, and more content - specs, features, shapes, flavors and themes.
Surfaces - Google will use this feed for the checkout system in AI Mode and Gemini and it can also be an ‘input’ into the new Business Agent.
This is going to be where the rubber hits the road on making the Google Agentic Commerce a great user experience. I have to admit it makes me nervous there’s not a clear spec here. To really catch up with what ChatGPT is doing, they (Gemini) needs more context - we’ve learned in the last 4 months - product-level context and storytelling is going to be the golden ticket foundation for Agentic Commerce. Googl needs to get in that game ASAP.
Direct Offers - Google’s First “Agentic Ad” Format
This one is particularly interesting given our Agentic Commerce 2026 Prediction #2 where we predicted in 2026 we’ll see an explosion of agentic ad experiments.
Google is launching Direct Offers - a new Google Ads pilot that allows advertisers to present exclusive offers directly in AI Mode.
Here’s how it works→
As the user is shopping and leaves Research and start getting into Find (SKU selection), if the user has a merchant’s product selected, that merchant can send a 1:1 “Direct Offer” to that consumer that is a discount→
In this example, a shopper searches for a rug and gets a “Sponsored deal” with 20% off from the retailer, valid through a specific date. The “Get code” button is right there in the experience.
How it works on the Retailer side:
The Retailers set up offers they want to feature in campaign settings
Google’s AI ad engine determines when an offer is relevant to display
Currently focused on discounts
Expanding to bundles, free shipping, and other value attributes
Launch partners include: PetCo, e.l.f. Cosmetics, Samsonite, Rugs USA, and Shopify merchants.
While it’s great they are experimenting, I’m not sure how many retailers are going to adopt this ad format because most retailers don’t want to offer lots of discounts (unless that’s part of their business model.
Business Agent
Business Agent adds a retailer-specific functionality powered by Gemini integrated with the AI Mode/Gemini agentic shopping experience.
Here’s what it looks like→
In this example, you go to a merchant aggregation area in the shopping experience and in there you see a prompt to fire up Business Agent→
What you can talk about with the agent is basically ‘chat with their catalog’ - at this point you are only talking about their products. It’s like having a chat with a merchant-specific slice of the overall catalog.
Google announced that Business Agent is live starting tomorrow with retailers like Lowe’s, Michael’s, Poshmark, Reebok, and others.
How to get going…
From Google:
Eligible U.S. retailers can choose to activate and customize this branded agent in Merchant Center. In the coming months, they’ll be able to train the agent based on their data, access new customer insights, provide offers for related products, and enable direct purchases– including agentic checkout – within the experience.
Google and Walmart Take Flight with Wing
This one, I have to admit I got wrong. Seeing that we were going to have Sundar and John Furner share the stage, I thought it would be more of an Agentic Commerce announcement (Walmart is interestingly not mentioned in the UCP or any other announcements).
I’m a huge drone fan, so wanted to share this one in more detail too.
What’s a Wing Drone?
In 2018 Google took their drone program and put it into the Alphabet subsidiary, Wing, with it’s own entity. You can learn more here. The Wing drones are quite substantial - with a 12m travel distance with speeds up to 60mph and it has forward and vertical maneuvering capabilities. It has a retractable tether type system that allows a payload to be picked up and delivered by lowering the tether.
.This is what they look like when deployed at Walmarts - there is a fenced off area with landing/charging pads and a cargo container type setup for operations:
At NRF this AM, Sundar and John announced:
Expanding the roll out of Wing capabilities from the starting two markets DFW and ATL.
New markets include 150 Walmarts stores over 2026 including the metros: Los Angeles, Miami, St Louis, Cincinnati, Houston, Orlando, Tampa and Charlotte.
Walmart said:
“Drone delivery remains a key part of our commitment to meeting customers where they are. As we’ve expanded drone delivery to more markets, we have seen strong customer adoption and enthusiasm for this added convenience,” said Greg Cathey, Senior Vice President of Digital Fulfillment Transformation at Walmart. “Bringing the service to new major metro areas across the country allows customers to get what they need from Walmart faster than ever, while continuing to provide meaningful value to the communities we serve.”
Other NRF Announcements
Google dropped a LOT more beyond the consumer side we care most about. Here’s a lightening round:
Gemini Enterprise for Customer Experience (CX) - GCP has a new ‘on-site’ retailer-focused solution (think Rufus/Sparky-esque) that brings shopping and customer service together. Kroger, Lowe’s, Papa Johns, Woolworths are already using it. Features include:
Complex reasoning: Instead of having shoppers manually search for every single item, the agent acts like an expert who understands their specific needs based on an individual shopper’s consent.
Multimodal interactions: The Shopping agent is able to understand image, video, and voice inputs without shoppers having to type what they are looking for into a search bar.
Executing consented actions: Most chatbots can only give shoppers information or links to follow. This agent takes consented action. If shoppers are indecisive about a product, the agent can provide options based on past shopping history from their local stores, take into account real-time product availability, and upon consent, add items to their cart and even handle checkout.
Customer Experience Agent Studio - This is the back-end ‘builder’ component of the Enterprise for CX front-end. It allows the retailer to load in data, test the agent, and then deploy it to their site.
AI Assist - GCP also has agents for training store associates called AI Assist. It has AI Coach (provides contextual assistance to customer service reps) and AI Trainer (simulates customer service conversations and scores the rep).
CX Insights - Finally, GCP has an Agentic system that goes through customer service rep conversations and scores their equality (Quality AI) and uncovers new trends/concerns/etc. (Discovery Engine)
Case Studies
Finally, Google revealed several interesting case studies of retailers using the Google Cloud retail-vertical solutions:
Home Depot Magic Apron Expansion - Massive AI upgrade including store-level localization, aisle-level product navigation, voice/text/image project planning, and AI-powered materials lists for pros.
Papa Johns Food Ordering Agent - First omnichannel deployment of Google’s Food Ordering agent across mobile, web, phone, kiosks, and in-car systems.
Honeywell Smart Shopping Platform - AI-enabled in-store navigation and personalization using Gemini on Honeywell devices.
Authentic Brands Group - Using Google Cloud AI to generate brand content. Early Reebok testing showed 60% higher ROAS on AI-enhanced creatives.
Gap Inc. - Going all-in on Google Cloud AI across Old Navy, Gap, Banana Republic, and Athleta.
That’s it for now
This is the biggest announcement drop in Agentic Commerce since ChatGPT launched Instant Checkout last fall. Google isn’t just catching up the are quite serious that they want to win the Agentic Commerce Game. They are showing that by, in early January, having Sundar headline NRF (didn’t wait for Google I/O) and he pushed his chips to the middle of the Agentic Commerce table and now the ball is in ChatGPT’s court. What’s your move Sam?
Stay tuned, and Happy Agentic Commercing! 🚀
Google Agentic Commerce Announcement Materials
Here’s a PDF that highlights today’s news with some extras that I wasn’t able to include in this substack post.
What do you think - is UCP the “one protocol to rule them all”? Sound off in comments→