At NRF'26, Google introduced UCP for agentic commerce while Walmart unveiled agent-led shopping in Gemini. Discover what Sundar Pichai (Google, CEO) and John Furner (Walmart, President & CEO) say about what it changes for discovery, loyalty, and conversion.
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Retail has lived through plenty of “next eras.”
The web. Mobile. Marketplaces. Social commerce.
Each wave promised a new kind of growth, and each quietly reset customer expectations.
What made the NRF conversation between Google and Walmart feel different was not the technology itself. It was the framing. This was not another channel to optimise. It was a structural shift in how discovery, decision, and delivery are stitched together, often without the shopper ever “going to a site.”
That is the tension marketers are wrestling with right now.
AI is accelerating the front end of commerce, but it is also threatening to flatten brand differentiation into whatever an assistant recommends. If the interface becomes a conversation, what happens to the funnel you’ve spent a decade engineering?
On stage, Alphabet CEO Sundar Pichai described the moment as a platform shift on the scale of web and mobile, with agents becoming the new interaction layer. Walmart CEO John Furner echoed the same idea, saying the retail playbook is being rewritten.
The through-line was not hype about chat. It was a shared concern: how retailers stay in control of the customer relationship in a world where the interface increasingly belongs to someone else.
Google’s core claim was that its approach to AI is not about one model or a set of demos. It is about infrastructure, research, models, and distribution working together at global scale.
In retail terms, that “full stack” message is not just chest-thumping. It is positioning.
Pichai highlighted how AI features are already changing discovery behaviour, with AI Overviews used at massive scale, and how retailer usage of Google’s AI APIs has surged year over year. The signal here is important: experimentation is moving into production.
For marketers, the implication is straightforward. AI-driven discovery is not coming. It is already here.
And as shopping shifts from keywords to conversational intent, retailers will increasingly compete on how well they can translate messy, human requests into confident, purchasable outcomes.
The most consequential announcement in the session was not a new model. It was a new protocol.
Google introduced the Universal Commerce Protocol (UCP), positioned as an open, commerce-specific standard that allows agents and merchants to speak a common language across discovery, decision, and checkout. The emphasis was explicit: keep the customer relationship front and centre, and preserve the retailer as merchant of record.
That wording matters.
It signals that Google is trying to avoid a future where the assistant becomes the merchant and the retailer is reduced to a supplier.
From a marketing perspective, UCP reframes what “conversion” even means. Pichai described a near-future experience where a buy button appears directly inside Google surfaces like AI Mode in Search and Gemini, enabling native checkout without leaving the conversation.
The demo scenario was deliberately familiar: a shopper planning a trip, narrowing to a product, receiving a tailored offer, enrolling in loyalty, adding complementary items, and paying with a saved wallet.
The shift is subtle but profound. The brand moment is no longer your PDP. It may be the agent’s UI.
That means loyalty logic, pricing rules, bundles, and personalisation must be portable and machine-readable, not just beautifully designed.
Walmart’s contribution grounded the conversation in operating reality.
Rather than focusing on a single chatbot, the company described a portfolio of agents across the business: a customer-facing agent called Sparky, associate tools on handheld devices that recommend best next actions, partner agents for sellers and suppliers, and developer agents to accelerate internal build velocity.
That portfolio approach is revealing.
Walmart is not treating agents as a feature. It is treating them as a new operating layer that connects intent to action across customers, associates, and partners.
The most telling moment was the announcement of an agent-led commerce experience built by Walmart within Google Gemini, with account linking that allows the experience to adapt to purchase history and context.
In other words, Walmart is choosing to show up inside a third-party assistant, but it is doing so with identity, assortment, pricing, and fulfilment logic intact.
For marketers, this is the blueprint for participating in AI-native surfaces without being commoditised: bring your differentiated assets into the assistant, rather than letting the assistant infer them.
Pichai’s pivot to delivery was a reminder that AI shopping is not just a UX change. It pulls operational performance directly into the brand experience.
He pointed to Wing and its partnership with Walmart as an example of innovation that starts small and scales through sustained investment. The performance signals were chosen carefully: repeat usage, sub-20-minute delivery for a large share of orders, and expansion across hundreds of sites reaching tens of millions of people.
For CMOs, the implication is uncomfortable but clear.
If agents remove friction from purchasing, the moment of truth shifts to fulfilment. Marketing can no longer over-promise without paying the penalty immediately.
The session also touched on ethical AI, watermarking, safety, and guardrails. Even if marketers are not building models, they will own the reputational consequences of synthetic content, misleading outputs, or unsafe experiences.
Google framed its approach as “bold and responsible,” highlighting investments in watermarking and enterprise-grade controls.
In practical terms, brand leaders should expect customers to increasingly question authenticity. Trust signals, provenance, and policy clarity will become differentiators, not footnotes.
Both leaders returned to a familiar principle: put the user first.
But the operational meaning of that idea has changed.
In agent-led commerce, being user-first means meeting customers where they are headed, while preserving the retailer’s value proposition and relationship. That is no longer guaranteed by owning the interface.
For marketers, the opportunity is real, but it is conditional. The winners will treat AI as a new distribution layer for commerce, not merely a creative tool.
That means investing in structured product data, real-time availability, loyalty portability, and the ability to express pricing and offers in environments you do not fully control.
Consumers will still “vote with their feet,” as Pichai put it.
In the agent era, they will also vote with their prompts.
And the brands that show up with the clearest answers, the fewest surprises, and the fastest follow-through will earn both.
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