AI is rewriting the rules of retail.

We see over five trillion searches on Google every year. And that number keeps growing. With AI Overviews and AI Mode, people are searching more – asking longer, more complex questions than ever before. This means they’re also finding more links, which means more opportunities for brands to be discovered and clicked.

But something more fundamental is shifting beneath the surface. Consumers aren’t just searching differently. They’re starting to delegate. This is the transition that defines the next era of retail.

FROM TOOL TO AGENT

For years, AI has played a supporting role in retail – recommending products, personalising emails, optimising ad spend. Useful, but still reactive. Still dependent on a human clicking “buy.” That’s changing. Agentic commerce – where AI acts on a consumer’s behalf, tracking a product, waiting for a price to drop, completing the purchase – is moving from concept to reality. The infrastructure is being built now.

Google and Shopify, Etsy, Wayfair, Target and Walmart are among those co-developing the Universal Commerce Protocol (UCP), an open standard that enables AI agents, businesses and payment systems to interact seamlessly. It’s designed to ensure that even as AI mediates more of the journey, the customer relationship stays central to the retailer.

With 51% of consumers already familiar with AI agents (Google, 2024), the technology is no longer ahead of the audience. Advancing our retail infrastructure is the next phase of the project.

THE CHOICE PARALYSIS PROBLEM

There’s a parallel challenge worth naming. 63% of shoppers abandon purchases simply because they are overwhelmed by choices and information (Google, 2024). Not because they couldn’t find the product, but because the experience of finding and deciding became too much work. A further 62% say purchase decisions take more effort than before (Google, 2024).

This is where AI’s role as an intelligent curator becomes commercially critical. Rather than returning search results, AI – through features like AI Overviews and AI Mode – provides personalised, intent-driven guidance that helps consumers bypass choice paralysis.

For retailers, this is both an opportunity and a pressure: if your content, data and product information aren’t structured for AI to interpret and surface, you won’t be part of that curated shortlist. AI Mode in Search now has over 75 million daily active users (Google, 2024), which means the audience for AI-mediated discovery is already here.

THE PHYSICAL WORLD IS GOING MULTIMODAL

Digital transformation is no longer confined to screens and text. Google Lens processes over 25 billion searches monthly and one in five of those has commercial intent (Google, 2024). Consumers are pointing their phones at products they see in a window, a magazine, or a friend’s kitchen, and expecting to find and buy them instantly. Retailers who optimise only for text-based search are leaving a significant part of the journey unaddressed.

Alongside visual search, query behaviour is also changing. In AI Mode, consumers are asking questions that are 2–3x longer than traditional search queries – more nuanced, more conversational, more specific. Short product titles and thin descriptions are increasingly inadequate. Rich, contextual product content is what gets surfaced.

SPEED OF CREATIVE HAS TO MATCH SPEED OF THE CONSUMER

Today’s consumer journey doesn’t follow a straight line. It’s a continuous loop of searching, scrolling, streaming, and shopping, across more than 130 daily mobile touchpoints (Google, 2024). Manual marketing can’t keep up with that.

Retailers need to rethink how they produce and deploy creatives. Fully integrating generative AI into creative workflows – as a real-time partner, not a post-production shortcut – allows brands to produce studio-quality assets in minutes and match them dynamically to the nuanced, long-form queries consumers are now asking. Marketers who deeply integrate AI tools report 60% greater revenue growth than peers who don’t (Google, 2024).

BUILDING THE CAPABILITIES TO COMPETE

Getting the strategy right is one thing. Building the organisational capabilities to execute is another.

Retailers must embrace a predictive, test-andlearn approach to AI. Google is constantly evolving its ad formats and tools – and retailers need to move with that pace, not behind it. That means feeding high-quality inputs into AI-powered tools: strong landing pages, well-structured creative assets, and clearly defined business goals. The quality of what goes in determines the quality of what comes out.

It also means deepening the integration of AI marketing tools across the board. AI-powered campaigns – including AI Max for Search, Demand Gen, and Performance Max – are built to adapt to the non-linear ways consumers now discover and buy. Combined with generative creative tools, they allow brands to produce studio-quality work at scale and match ads dynamically to complex consumer intents. Marketers who deeply integrate these tools report 60% greater revenue growth than peers who don’t (Google, 2024).

The gap between retailers using AI and retailers competing with AI is widening. The difference is depth of integration.

THE OMNICHANNEL SHOPPER IS YOUR MOST VALUABLE CUSTOMER

68% of consumers are channel-agnostic, moving freely between online and offline depending on the moment. And these omnichannel shoppers spend 73% more than their single-channel counterparts (Google, 2024). The business case for seamless channel integration has never been stronger.

But winning those shoppers requires delivering on three things in the physical store:

• Convenience – making the journey frictionless at every step.
• Expertise – knowledgeable in-store associates remain a powerful conversion lever. Sales influenced by store staff carry a 194% higher average order value than those that aren’t.
• Experience – physical stores must be sensory, social, and worth the trip. Long queues and overcrowding are the fastest ways to undermine that expectation.

The store isn’t competing with digital. It’s completing it. The retailers who treat the physical experience as the culmination of a digitally-informed journey – not a separate channel – are the ones capturing the full value of that 73% spending premium.