Future Commerce · 2026-05-27 · 23 min
Recorded live at Google Marketing Live 2026, Phillip and eCommerce reporter Nicole Silberstein sit down with Ashish Gupta, VP & GM of Merchant Shopping at Google, who is behind the foundational commerce infrastructure powering the Shopping Graph and Universal Commerce Protocol. Gupta breaks down the GML announcements: UCP's expansion beyond shopping into hotels and food delivery, the multi-item Universal Cart that spans Search, Gemini, YouTube, and Gmail, and why the future of agentic commerce still depends on merchants nailing the fundamentals. A Shopper for Every Shopper Key takeaways: UCP is expanding beyond shopping into hotel bookings and local food delivery, giving every shopper their own personal shopper. The Universal Cart lets shoppers buy multiple items at once across Google surfaces, streamlining the buying experience as shoppers venture from inspiration to discovery and comparison. Merchants remains the seller of record no matter where the transaction is completed, tackling industry concerns about disintermediation. Conversational attributes enrich product feeds so AI can match nuanced shopper intent.
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