“Universal Cart normalizes the expectation of agent-assisted decision-making at a mass consumer level,” says Holly Enneking, VP of marketing at Markup AI, an AI content software company. “This sets up a future where B2B buyers arrive at a sales conversation already filtered, scored, and pre-decided by AI, not by your storytelling, or your brand equity.”
What this means for brands
Introducing agent-assigned decision-making as the new middleman between brands and consumers in the purchasing journey has some technologists predicting that brands’ DTC touchpoints could be taken out of the loop.
“In two to three years, the purchase journey as fashion brands have understood it will largely no longer exist,” says Max Sinclair, CEO of Azoma AI, which helps brands with their AI search strategies. “The shopper will set an instruction, an agent will execute it on their behalf, and the brand will find out it was selected, only when the order lands.”
This means that when a consumer makes a purchase in Google’s new cart after searching, checking emails, or watching YouTube, brands have fewer opportunities to influence the decision at the point of sale than they previously did through creative, merchandising, and last-minute upsell. Additionally, a major caveat is whether the agent even surfaced the brand in the first place.
Ever since Google and ChatGPT introduced dedicated AI shopping features this time last year, brands and marketers have been reshaping their online brand visibility so that products can be surfaced by both traditional search engine algorithms (via SEO) and AI models, via the emerging practice of “AIO” (AI optimization). Now, Google’s Universal Cart puts an AI agent front and center, making the first round of decisions, rather than a consumer simply asking a chatbot a question and perhaps consulting traditional search at the same time.
“With Universal Cart alongside Google’s Agent Payments Protocol, consumers are setting parameters for agents to buy on their behalf, which means a brand is either in the agent profile, or it’s not in consideration, full stop,” says Enneking. “That’s a massive barrier to break through. It’s not just about affinity anymore; it’s about whether your brand relationship is strong enough to get encoded into how someone’s AI agent shops for them.” As it stands, Enneking doesn’t think many brands are ready to confront or adapt to this shift.
According to Sinclair, the fields that power agentic reasoning, including product details like fit, materials, care, and compatibility, are simultaneously “the most ignored real estate” in e-commerce. This compounds with additional factors outside a brand’s control, such as online consumer product reviews and discussions in online forums like Reddit, which have seen a resurgence in utility in recent years and are known to aid AI’s processing of information.
“Brands auditing those attributes now are quietly setting themselves up to be the ones Universal Cart recommends. The ones ignoring them are about to find out how expensive that decision was,” Sinclair says. Beyond product metadata, experts say Google’s new AI shopping feature transforms brands’ and retailers’ inventory accuracy into a consumer-facing metric.
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