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Good morning. Google on Sunday announced a new set of AI agent tools designed to help retailers manage shopping, support, and ordering within their own apps, WSJ Leadership Institute's Belle Lin reports.
The tools, including a food-ordering agent that can do things like estimate how many pizzas a group needs from a user-uploaded photo (too early to talk pizza?), mark the latest salvo among vendors as e-commerce emerges as a battleground for AI agents.
OpenAI helped kick off the wave of AI-assisted shopping last fall with its Instant Checkout feature. In January, Microsoft announced its own checkout feature for its Copilot chatbot.
For retailers, the surge of new shopping tools presents both an opportunity and a risk as companies try to get ahead of AI-assisted commerce before it significantly reshapes how people shop.
“Things are moving at a pace that if you’re not already deep into [AI agents], you’re probably creating a competitive barrier or disadvantage,” Yael Cosset, Kroger’s chief digital officer and executive vice president, tells Belle.
The Cincinnati-based grocer, along with home improvement giant Lowe’s and pizza chain Papa Johns, are testing the new tools, which Google calls Gemini Enterprise for Customer Experience.
It’s still early. AI agents are evolving quickly, and for tech leaders the focus is on making systems work smoothly together, connecting them to existing data, and, for now, partnering with multiple vendors.
That reality was underscored Sunday when Google also introduced a new standard called Universal Commerce Protocol, designed to help apps, merchants, and payment processors work together for purchases made by AI agents.
Lowe's Chief Digital and Information Officer Seemantini Godbole and Cosset at Kroger both say they are working with several tech vendors.
“I don’t want to be an AI expert in terms of building the agents,” Papa Johns Chief Digital and Technology Officer Kevin Vasconi tells the WSJLI. “I want to be an AI expert in terms of, ‘How do I use the agents?’”
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