AI took center stage at NRF’s Big Show on Sunday, with Walmart and Google announcing a joint effort to elevate the shopper experience online via agentic commerce.
Sundar Pichai, chief executive officer of Google and Alphabet, and incoming Walmart CEO John Furner disclosed at NRF convention at Manhattan’s Javits Center that consumers using Google’s AI-powered shopping assistant, Gemini, will be able to more easily discover and shop products from Walmart and Sam’s Club stores and get a more personalized experience.
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“Today we are introducing the Universal Commerce Protocol, or UCP,” Pichai said. “It was built to meet the needs of retailers and customers, keeping the full customer relationship front and center from the moments of discovery, decision and beyond. It’s open, agnostic and built together with many of you, thanks to all of our partners, especially our foundation partners, Shopify, Etsy, Wayfair, Target and Walmart, who helped build UCP alongside us. There’s more than 20 global advisers who have shaped the protocol.”
“I think about it like a conversational and knowledgeable sales associate,” he said. “You can ask your questions and it will give proactive recommendations.”
UCP allows AI agents to shop and make purchases for consumers across different online stores. Last October, Walmart partnered with ChatGPT, a competitor to Google’s Gemini. “You might wonder why we are introducing another protocol,” Pichai said. “It’s important that the industry needs a protocol that works on a global scale and takes into account the nuances of the e-commerce journey. There’s a lot that UCP will enable. It transforms fragmented search, commerce and service touch points into a seamless customer journey, whether you need a shopping assistant, a bot agent or help with merchandising.”
Among the features, Google’s Gemini will not only display products from Walmart and Sam’s Club stores and websites based on an inquiry, it will call up additional relevant products and services during the online conversation, based on what’s requested and the shoppers’ past purchases, thereby providing a greater sense of discovery and personalization. It will also link up to Walmart’s loyalty membership program and enable shoppers to cash in on points earned.
“For years, online shopping has been about keywords, filters, drop-down menus and scrolling through multiple pages until you find what you want,” Pichai said. “Now you can type exactly what you’re looking for, including really specific details and words. And AI can do the hard work narrowing it down to what you’re most interested in buying. This is what’s already happening.”
The executives also discussed Wing, Alphabet’s drone delivery service that provides speedy deliveries of small items from Walmart stores to homes.
“Roughly 50 percent people who use the service use it again,” Pichai said. “Half of the deliveries happen in 20 minutes or less. The fastest deliveries are around six minutes. And I’m excited today that our partnership [with Walmart] is expanding to an additional 150 sites to a total of 270 sites. Forty million people will have access to delivery with Wing. It shows how you can work together to drive innovation.”
Furner acknowledged that working with Wing is complicated. “There are regulations. There’s the weight of the aircraft and the load, and the speed,” of the delivery drone. “There’s lot of these considerations. What’s exciting is that the additional sites will take us coast to coast, from L.A. to Miami and across the country. Customers love the service.”
In other innovations at Google, “We are working on things like quantum computing and a few weeks ago, we announced we’re going to take our first step, to put data centers in space that will take 10 to 20 years out,” Pichai said. “But being able to take those bold, big bets is how you signal to the organization that innovation matters. Having said that you have to adapt as a company. The pace of innovation is getting faster.
“We are investing more resources in safety and security of AI than any technology before, particularly for our enterprise partners who want to give the guarantee that all the work we are doing here, they can use it with controls and safety and security.”
During his conversation with Pichai, Furner discussed the various AI agents Walmart has, including “Sparky,” which helps consumers shop and an agent for Walmart associates to help team members and customers. There’s also a partner agent for sellers and suppliers helping them determine the best ways to list products, and how to build campaigns that better reach customers, and there’s an agent that’s helping developers.
With agentic commerce, Furner said, “At this point, we’re writing the retail playbook, which is exciting, and we’re trying to close the gap between I want it, and I have it. For Walmart, we think the future is very personalized, very convenient and being high speed.”
According to Pichai, “We’ve been partnering with retailers and helping them grow through technology shifts for more than two decades, and we are excited for a new era of partnership ahead.”
