[00:00:00] Phillip: Hello, and welcome to Future Commerce, the podcast at the intersection of culture and commerce. I'm Phillip, and today we're live at Google I/O 2026 talking about all the updates, well, to Universal Commerce Protocol, AP2, how consumers are gonna shop and discover content and make decisions to purchase things in the future. And today, to talk about it, we have Suresh Ganapathy, who is the Senior Director of Product Management over Consumer Shopping here at Google. Tell us about the updates, and we're gonna talk a little bit about the executives and the retailer operators that are listening, how they're gonna use it, and how they're gonna make a difference in their business.
[00:00:35] Suresh: Yeah. Thank you so much. I am really excited to be here. So today, we announced that we're laying the foundational building blocks of agent to commerce, and we had updates across three building blocks. The first is UCP, or the Universal Commerce Protocol. Mhmm. We are expanding UCP to new verticals, including travel and local food delivery. We're launching it to new markets, and we're bringing it to YouTube. There's been tremendous momentum across the industry on UCP, and we're excited to build on it. The second building block is AP2, or agentic payments, where we are bringing agentic payments now to Google products starting with Gemini Spark this fall. So you can have your agent make purchases for you securely against your precise guidance. And the third, the one I'm most excited about, is the Universal Cart. This is your agentic hub for all of your shopping needs across Google. You can add products that you're inspired by or considering buying from across Google surfaces, Search, Gemini, YouTube, Gmail, and then have the cart go to work for you, finding deals, price drops, letting you know when things are back in stock, letting you know if the things that you added to the cart don't work well together. Really excited to be bringing the cart to shoppers this summer, starting with Search and Gemini.
[00:01:59] Phillip: Let's talk about Universal Cart, because I do think it's one of the bigger announcements here today. For a long time, a lot of people have talked about, well, how do we get a mixed mode cart? How do we get this insight from across the web to get users who are inspired everywhere? That was creators who are creating content on YouTube, to your point earlier, to search and browse discovery. They're having to incur a lot of friction to go to a lot of brand sites. And I'm really interested to understand, you know, some of the finer mechanics on how this is working. And if it's working in the wild today, some of the demos look really incredible. And I think one of the other points that I think lots of folks are gonna probably make some contrasts and comparisons against is we saw something very similar last year with Amazon's Buy with Prime. And if, you know, if I had to posit what people are going to say, is this everywhere, or does it have to be through a very specific portal like Amazon's experience was? And so give me a little bit about the consumer experience in a nutshell.
[00:03:11] Suresh: Yeah. Absolutely. So first, just, you know, setting context. People come to shop at Google over a billion times a day. And we wanna make sure that we're delivering the best experience in what they do. And I'm sure this is the case for you as well, like when you go to buy something, it's rarely done in a single sitting. Mhmm. So you go look up a little, you watch a video, you're inspired by it, and then you go to search, you search for something, you like some products, and then oftentimes when you get back to it, you're kinda starting from scratch. And so research tells us that shoppers want us to manage some of these tedious parts of shopping where we maintain state, we do some of the hard work on letting you know, hey, you were interested in this item and now it's available, you know, for a little lesser. And so that's the core idea behind creating a cart, which is as and when you find things that you're inspired by, considering buying, you can add it to cart and the cart goes to work for you. It does everything from tracking prices, you know, letting you know when the best time to buy is, when something's back in stock.
[00:04:13] Suresh: And we shared... Vidya shared this thing about compatibility earlier today. I'd love to share a personal example. I've been geeking out, similar to our conversation earlier, on podcast equipment. I'm trying to build a way fancier than I need home WiFi system. And it turns out it has many different components, not the single router that I used to buy. Right. And I managed a lot of conversations with Gemini and AI mode later. Managed to get an ensemble of products. Mhmm. But then I realized that I used a Cat 5 cable. It's an Ethernet cable. Sure. And the moment you do that, apparently, you lose all of the bandwidth. Right. And there you go. And you need a Cat 6 or a 6a. Yeah. Didn't know that. So it would be really helpful for, you know, the cart to tell me and make sure that I don't buy the wrong cable that kind of makes the whole system work suboptimally. And in that case, I probably wouldn't have realized even after I bought the whole system because it would work. So I'm excited about us starting to solve some of these problems that shoppers run into time and time again.
[00:05:19] Phillip: One of the bigger problems I think shoppers run into is how do I get the most value as a shopper, either at the buying at the right time for the right deal or using the right card at the right time. And that was one of the things that I felt like in the announcement is probably the biggest consumer value here, is which of my cards has the active promo or the active deal that I have already opted into. I feel like the wallet integration is key to that. So what's next? I know that the points of inspiration are where the cart can show up. Gmail is part of it. YouTube is part of it. How long can we expect before we start to see this on the consumer end? And what is it like for the merchant's experience?
[00:06:05] Suresh: Yeah. Absolutely. So we're rolling out the cart on Search and the Gemini app this summer, and then YouTube and Gmail coming after. On the merchant side, like with all the other agentic building blocks and experiences we built, we have built it with merchants in mind and have taken their feedback into account. So for the merchant, the merchant is the seller of record with the cart. They also have the option to enable shoppers to buy directly on Google or transfer items over to their website where the shopper can buy from there. The feedback so far from merchants has been great. They're really excited about this. This is a new surface for consumers to shop, and so it should hopefully drive more incremental traffic and conversions to them.
[00:06:53] Phillip: The lingering question that we're going to get, and I think we'll have to pine on, is does this give me more visibility into how agents are shopping and helping consumers to shop, or does it further obfuscate my visibility into my analytics on how people are searching and discovering products with my brand? Right? But I think that that's been one of the bigger friction points for merchants with agentic in the last year, year and a half, zero click phenomena. Right? Maybe that's something you're solving here?
[00:07:23] Suresh: It's a good question. So again, merchants are definitely in control here. They own the customer relationship. They're a seller of record. When through either of those options that I shared earlier, merchants are going to have visibility into who is interested and can purchase from them.
[00:07:40] Phillip: And just the way it should be. Let's talk a little bit about some of the other points to Universal Commerce Protocol. There are new partners that just came along. That was a big part of the announcement. Amazon, right, I guess, is coming along for the ride. Tell us a little bit about how that has matured since the January announcement.
[00:07:59] Suresh: Yeah. So, I think this was in February, we announced that we were bringing on Amazon and Stripe, Microsoft, Salesforce, Meta, all to steer this tech council, which has been incredible. Mhmm. Like, Vidya joked, it's rare to see so many people coming together across the industry to rally on this protocol. So we're all not speaking different languages and building fragmented experiences for consumers across the industry. That's been incredible. And so the announcements today, like, help us build further on that momentum, you know, by starting new verticals. And so we're excited about what this brings both to shoppers in terms of seamless experiences, but also to merchants.
[00:08:45] Phillip: How does AP2 play into this? There was a lot of discussion in some of the announcements today about consumers having greater control, but also accountability, being able to set, to your earlier point, not just watches on things like product price or back in stock inventory, but also giving more agency to an agent to purchase on their behalf. Yeah. Let's talk a little bit about how those features work.
[00:09:11] Suresh: Yeah. It's really exciting times to be having these conversations, to start with. Sure. I think, like, again going back to that same theme, we wanna make it really simple for shoppers to, like, enjoy the fun parts of shopping and then delegate some of these more tedious aspects to agents. The big concern obviously is, will this thing go do buy something, like leave me with a giant bill, and in this case it was a motorbike, but I assume even if it's something lesser than that, we don't want the agent to do something that you are not, like, fundamentally asking the agent to do. So there's a few key pieces right here. Like, the first thing is we wanna make it easy for you to state what your criteria, what are you looking for, what products, what variants, what is your flexibility within those things, what merchants, people have preferences on what merchants they shop from, their budget criteria. And then once that is clear, then it's possible for the agent to go act on the basis of that. But then we also need to make sure there are clear boundaries and there's accountability on those boundaries. And so what AP2 does with these tamper proof contracts is it creates this transparent link between the shopper and the merchant that's verifiable. So the constraints that the shopper shared in the first place are visible to the merchant. They can verify that it came from the shopper. And so the agent is not gonna go off and do something else, is accountable to follow your instructions. And then there is also selective disclosures in AP2, which makes sure that your privacy is preserved through all of this and only required information is shared with each of the different parties.
[00:10:56] Phillip: That, I think, is the bigger consumer concern. I think on the merchant side, they're always going to be asked, well, is Google just trying to own the payment rails with, you know, my consumer? The biggest concern I will always come down to for a merchant, it's pretty tedious, pretty difficult, especially around, you know, taxation, shipping. These are things that I think maybe you have some visibility into with Google Shopping. I guess it remains to be seen how it's going to work, but I think consumers wanting things on autopilot is the desire that's latent that you can activate today.
[00:11:38] Suresh: Yeah. I mean, on the consumer side, you could imagine use cases like, you know, there's a shoe drop and I've been wanting to buy the shoe. Mhmm. And I don't have to go sit and refresh, refresh. And you know, now I can have the agent go, like, buy it for me. You know? But my criteria are never gonna be strict. Right? I might be open to a couple of colors. I might be open to a couple of small variations and sizes, like people have different preferences. And now I can instruct my agent to do those things for me and, you know, give it, you know, more flexibility in what I wanted to buy. Hopefully, this kind of, you know, our expectation is that this will create a new customer where, again, both shoppers and merchants can thrive. You know, shoppers get, you know, more tools at their disposal. Merchants, you know, get, you know, more purchases because now I may have given up and not actually decided to buy that shoe because it's too much work. Or it's 7AM in the morning, I need to get my kids ready and I don't have time to hit refresh.
[00:12:36] Phillip: So just to put a bow on it, I don't know if we've covered all of the bases, but Spark is the agent that makes it all happen for the consumer.
[00:12:44] Suresh: Yes. We're starting with Spark. Right? This fall.
[00:12:46] Phillip: Okay. Spark. And this relationship that we're developing with the agent is one, I think, is... we used to have these parasocial relationships with influencers. I think, obviously, we still do. I think the psychosocial relationship is starting to develop with the relationship we have with our agents and the way that they accomplish work for us and the way that they understand us on a deeper level. How do consumers come into contact with this? Is it in the Gemini app? Are they going to find their way into it elsewhere?
[00:13:20] Suresh: We'll start with, like, the Gemini app and, you know, the surfaces where Spark is available, but I think we'll have to figure out more along the way. I think at this point, we just have, you know, the Gemini app to kinda share externally as an announcement. Right. It's an area that we're obviously very excited about. Yeah.
[00:13:40] Phillip: Spark is the agent. AP2 is the... that's the payments protocol. You've got your accountability there. Yes. And then Universal Cart is the ability for consumers to have less amounts of friction, potentially for merchants to have more visibility in front of that consumer and have the consumer be able to buy more of what they want, exactly the right type of thing that they want, with higher degree of accuracy. And then it's all undergirded by the Universal Commerce Protocol that's powering it all. Is that about right?
[00:14:13] Suresh: I couldn't have said it better. What have we missed? Anything? No. This is great.
[00:14:16] Phillip: I couldn't have said it better. Well, thanks for having us here at I/O. I can't wait to see what happens here as we head into Google Marketing Live tomorrow, and I am really excited to get my hands on a lot of this for myself.
[00:14:27] Suresh: Thank you so much. Yeah. Appreciate you. Thank you.
