News
The Gist
- Unified CX platform. Google, through Google Cloud, launches Gemini Enterprise integrating shopping and customer service.
- Advanced AI agents. Prebuilt and configurable agents handle complex tasks and multimodal inputs.
- Retailer impact focus. Retailers like Kroger and Lowe's can deliver more personalized support and streamline customer journeys.
Google says unified AI agents—not siloed chatbots—will define the next era of retail customer experience.
The company unveiled Gemini Enterprise for Customer Experience (CX) on Jan. 11, at NRF 2026 in New York. The AI-powered solution aims to integrate shopping and customer service into a single interface for retailers and restaurants.
The platform introduces prebuilt and configurable agents developed using Google's Gemini models. According to company officials, businesses can deploy these agents in days and manage them across the entire customer lifecycle, from product discovery to post-purchase resolution.
Kroger, Lowe's and Woolworths Group announced plans to adopt the platform. Google, through its Google Cloud computing services suite, asserts the solution addresses limitations of traditional chatbots, which often force customers to repeat information across channels.
Table of Contents
- Personalized Customer Experience Via AI
- Feature Breakdown for Gemini Enterprise for CX
- Google CEO Sundar Pichai: Customer Journey Is About Delivery
- Google Advances Gemini
- Agentic AI Market > Conversational Chatbots?
- Google Background
Personalized Customer Experience Via AI
With Gemini Enterprise for Customer Experience, we are enhancing our AI-powered home improvement advisor, Mylow, to provide guidance personalized to a customer's home, their project, and where they live, bringing new levels of confidence to every decision.
- Seemantini Godbole, chief digital and information officer
Lowe's
Feature Breakdown for Gemini Enterprise for CX
| Capability | Description |
|---|---|
| Shopping Agent | Handles complex requests with reasoning, multimodal inputs and consented actions |
| Multimodal Interactions | Processes image, video and voice inputs for product discovery |
| Consented Actions | Adds items to cart and handles checkout with customer permission |
| CX Agent Studio | Enables businesses to build, test and deploy multimodal support agents |
| Active Problem Solving | Orchestrates actions across systems for issue resolution |
Google CEO Sundar Pichai: Customer Journey Is About Delivery
In an abridged transcript of remarks delivered at NRF 2026, Google CEO Sundar Pichai frames retail as a front-line industry in what he calls an “AI platform shift,” arguing that the next phase of digital commerce will be defined by agents that can move customers from discovery to decision to purchase without breaking the retailer relationship.
Pichai points to rapid adoption metrics as evidence of how fast the market is moving, noting Google Cloud Vertex AI processed 8.3 trillion tokens in December 2024 and “over 90 trillion tokens” a year later, “an 11X-plus increase year over year.” He positions Google’s “full stack approach to AI innovation” as a differentiator for retailers trying to modernize shopping experiences end-to-end.
On discovery, Pichai highlights the Shopping Graph as foundational infrastructure for AI-driven retail journeys, citing “over 50 billion product listings” with “more than 2 billion” refreshed hourly. He argues AI Mode is shifting shopping from keyword search to “natural conversations,” where AI narrows options and reduces the effort required to evaluate products. He also notes Google brought the Shopping Graph into the Gemini app to improve responses to shopping-related questions.
AI can help at every step, from discovery and decision to delivery and everything else that goes into creating a full customer experience.
- Sundar Pichai
CEO of Google and Alphabet
On decision and checkout, Pichai introduces the Universal Commerce Protocol (UCP), describing it as “open” and “agnostic,” built with brands including Shopify, Etsy, Wayfair, Target and Walmart, and “endorsed by 20+ more.” He emphasizes UCP’s compatibility with existing protocols (including Agent2Agent, the Agent Payments Protocol and Model Context Protocol), and positions it as a global-scale interoperability layer for agentic commerce. A key near-term outcome: native checkout experiences, where “you’ll see a buy button directly on Google surfaces including AI Mode in Search and Gemini,” with retailers remaining the merchant of record and retaining control of the customer relationship.
Pichai also connects these standards to Google’s product strategy, citing Gemini Enterprise for Customer Experience as the company’s agentic retail platform that unifies “search, commerce and service touch points” into a single journey. He notes it is integrated with UCP and available “today in preview,” alongside work with retailers like Kroger on shopping agents that can operate directly inside a retailer’s own app and behave like a “knowledgeable sales associate.”
Finally, he extends the customer journey story to fulfillment, arguing delivery remains costly and complex and spotlighting Wing’s drone delivery partnership with Walmart. Pichai says Wing and Walmart doubled deliveries in existing markets in 2025 and announced expansions beginning in Houston “next week,” with additional U.S. cities (including Orlando, Tampa and Charlotte) planned next.
Google Advances Gemini
Google closed 2025 with significant AI momentum, highlighted by the November release of Gemini 3, featuring enhanced reasoning capabilities and a 1 million-token context window. The company deployed the model across its entire product ecosystem on launch day and launched Antigravity, a new agent development application. The Gemini 3 launch fueled a 65% stock rally for the year, pushing Alphabet's market cap to nearly $4 trillion.
Regulatory and competitive pressures intensified throughout 2025. A U.S. federal judge barred Google from exclusive search deals, while the European Commission levied a €2.95 billion fine over ad-tech practices. Google's market share dropped below 90% for the first time in nearly a decade.
Despite regulatory headwinds, Alphabet posted its first-ever $100 billion revenue quarter, with Q3 2025 reporting $102.3 billion—up 16% year over year—and Google Cloud growing 34% to $15.2 billion.
Agentic AI Market > Conversational Chatbots?
Agentic CX is reshaping how retailers manage customer journeys, replacing scripted chatbots with autonomous systems that reason and act.
During Cyber Week 2025, AI agents influenced 20% of all orders, accounting for $67 billion in global sales. Retailers deploying branded AI agents grew sales 32% faster than competitors.
Organizations implementing autonomous AI systems reported a 28% improvement in issue resolution time and a 19% increase in first-contact resolution rates, according to the 2025 CMSWire State of the CMO Report.
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Success depends on integration, not plug-and-play tools. Effective agentic AI requires backend system access, data orchestration and human oversight frameworks.
Google Background
A global technology provider founded in 1998 in California, Google serves consumers, enterprises and developers across a wide portfolio of digital products and services. Its business solutions include Google Ads, Google Marketing Platform, Google Cloud Platform and Google Workspace, with a focus on advertising, cloud infrastructure, productivity and AI-driven services.
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