Drill, baby, drill! How Walmart's agentic experimentation with Google and OpenAI promises a new shopping experience

With the National Retail Federation’s Big Show in full flow this week in New York, AI and the retail sector has been a burning topic again. One of the bigger announcements of the week was a tie-up between Google and Walmart around the launch of the former’s Universal Commerce Protocol (UCP), a new open standard around Agentic Commerce.

According to Alphabet CEO Sundar Pichai, the UCP is designed to enable different commerce and retail systems to communicate more effectively:

The industry needs a protocol that works at global scale and takes into account the nuances of commerce journeys, and this is a critical building block for it

The first major implementation of UCP will be native checkout functionality to enable users to complete purchases directly within AI conversations without leaving Google’s platforms. It launches shortly on Google’s AI Mode in Search and the Gemini app.

As ...