The news: Google announced new capabilities for its Universal Commerce Protocol to make it easier for users to shop.

• Agents can now save or add multiple items to a shopping cart from a single store.
• Users on UCP-integrated platforms will be able to receive loyalty or member benefits while shopping.
• Agents can retrieve select real-time product information—such as availability, pricing, and variants—from retailers’ catalogs when required.

Why it matters: These updates are certainly quality-of-life improvements for UCP adopters and Gemini shoppers, but whether they will make agentic commerce more appealing for the rest of the population remains to be seen. Even with these new features, it is more complicated for shoppers to navigate an AI platform than to transact via traditional methods, which explains why 95% of AI-platform driven ecommerce sales will happen on brand and retailer sites this year.

The main constraint on AI platforms’ shopping ambitions is that while users are happy to use those tools for research, they’re mostly hesitant to complete transactions with them. That’s partly an issue of trust: Among shoppers who use AI, 55% are extra-cautious about sharing payment information with the tool, according to Criteo’s 2026 Commerce and AI Trend Report. But it’s also because AI shopping assistants—at least for now—are just one tool among many for consumers, and they have not yet shown that they can handle the end-to-end experience reliably and seamlessly.

Implications for retailers: It will take time—and resources—for AI platforms to work out the kinks in agentic shopping. At the same time, it is by no means guaranteed that those platforms will become shoppers’ preferred method for purchasing. Agentic commerce adoption will be hampered by the limitations of AI platforms and consumers’ reluctance to hand over personal and payment information to companies they don’t entirely trust.

Rather than diving headfirst into UCP partnerships or launching a ChatGPT app, brands and retailers should focus on maximizing visibility on AI platforms to ensure they can reach consumers at the point of inspiration.