The news: Google rolled out a series of agentic commerce updates to help brands and retailers capture holiday sales and keep up with shifting consumer behavior.

The new features include:

• Expanded access to AI performance insights for businesses in the US, Canada, India, New Zealand, and Australia
• Retailer access to Business Agent for YouTube ads, which enables shoppers to interact with a branded agent that can answer product questions and offer guidance without leaving the YouTube interface
• Enhanced Universal Commerce Protocol (UCP) capabilities, such as the ability to transfer carts to merchant sites

The big picture: Google is framing these tools as a necessity for retailers hoping to improve conversions and visibility as more shoppers use AI to inform their holiday purchases.

• Roughly 1 in 4 online shoppers plan to start their holiday shopping journeys on an AI platform such as ChatGPT, Google Gemini, or Claude, while an additional 13% expect to use retailers’ own AI shopping agents, according to Bain’s 2026 Holiday Shopping Outlook.
• A separate holiday report from PwC found that 29% of consumers expect to use AI at some point during the holiday shopping, up from 22% in 2025.

However, growing comfort with AI tools hasn’t increased shoppers’ willingness to check out directly on AI platforms, which Google implicitly acknowledged with its new cart transfer feature. Just 10% of AI-assisted digital shoppers usually complete purchases on a native AI platform after using it for research, compared with 69% who usually buy on a retailer’s website or app and 14% who go to a physical store, according to a survey conducted by Publicis Commerce and EMARKETER.

What retailers are doing: Most retailers are hedging their bets to reach shoppers wherever they can—especially those lacking their own AI shopping assistants to help simplify the shopping process.

• Best Buy recently announced an integration with ChatGPT to enable users to find gift ideas and complete purchases within the platform.
• Tapestry became the latest brand to sign up with Google’s UCP, making Coach and Kate Spade products purchasable through AI Mode and Gemini for US users.

Other companies are promoting their own AI tools in a bid to protect their customer relationships.

Amazon has so far avoided major third-party AI commerce partnerships, betting that a wider array of AI features—including the recently added Alexa for Shopping deal tracking for specific products or attributes—will offer shoppers enough utility to keep them from venturing to ChatGPT or Google first for product research.

Target also highlighted new AI features ahead of the holiday season, including visual search, review summaries, and a “buy again” feature that uses AI to surface frequently purchased items and relevant deals.

Implications for the holiday season: More consumers are looking to AI as a means of eliminating pain points in holiday shopping, particularly in deal seeking. Twenty-five percent of US holiday gift buyers plan to use AI-powered tools to find discounts this year, according to a July Tinuiti survey.

Retailers need to keep up as shopping habits change. We expect retailers to have the advantage over third-party AI platforms until at least 2030. But more advanced shopping capabilities and expanded brand selection could give platforms like ChatGPT and Gemini greater influence over product research and discovery, weakening retailers’ direct relationships with shoppers. To protect those ties, retailers will need a wider array of AI-powered shopping tools that can both inspire customers and shorten the path to purchase within their own channels.