Google has positioned its Gemini AI engine as the core infrastructure for the next generation of digital advertising and commerce, aimed at helping businesses grow more intelligently across search and YouTube.
The company is moving beyond traditional automation towards autonomous, agentic artificial intelligence (AI) systems, signalling a broader shift in how brands engage consumers and how digital retail operates.
Google's growing focus on agentic commerce also reflects how AI is reshaping the retail landscape by adapting to changing consumer behaviour, product discovery, and purchasing decisions.
"Gemini is becoming the AI engine behind Google's next-generation ads and commerce platform," Dan Taylor, vice-president of global ads at Google, said at a press roundtable.
Gemini is turning AI from an operational tool into an intelligent growth engine, and 2026 is the year AI transitions from potential to everyday reality, he noted.
The integration of the Gemini AI engine across Google's entire ads and commerce infrastructure has drastically improved the company's ability to match complex consumer intent with advertiser solutions.
Consumer search queries in AI mode are three times longer than traditional searches, one in six AI queries are non-text (voice, image or video), and 75% of users report making faster, more confident decisions using AI mode.
TOP PRIORITIES
Mr Taylor said Google has three strategic priorities, including reinventing advertising for the new era of search.
Gemini has strengthened Google's ad quality systems, cutting irrelevant ads by 40% while improving the ability to match longer and more complex search queries.
As Google continues to test ads in AI mode in the US, it is introducing two new ad formats designed to deliver more contextualised and useful experiences, featuring independent AI-generated explainers powered by Gemini models.
The two formats are conversational discovery ads in AI, which generate customised ad creatives based on complex questions, and highlighted answers, allowing advertisers to appear as featured recommendations in AI-curated lists alongside independent AI explainers.
The second priority for the company is expanding agentic commerce capabilities for retailers. Google is expanding "direct offers" with promotion bundling such as combining a discount with a free accessory to close deals in AI-assisted conversations and integrating travel offers directly into AI trip planning.
The third is Google's advertising and commerce tools are enabling marketing intelligence to become strategic partners to businesses.
The new Ask Advisor works across Google's in-product agents -- Google Ads, Google Analytics, Google Marketing Platform, and soon Merchant Center -- to offer proactive personalised recommendations that save marketers time and help them to reach their business goals.
Ask Advisor is available in a beta version for English-language accounts, with new features rolling out in the coming months.
"With Gemini underpinning our advertising and our commerce tools, we're moving from marketing automation to marketing intelligence," said Mr Taylor.
Organisations can enhance efficiency by automating operating workflows, integrating first-party data, and embedding AI deeply to unlock significant revenue growth.
Transitioning content strategies from traditional keywords to structured, multi-modal data ensures a brand's ads reach the right consumer at the right time.
"Our monetisation model for these new AI-powered experiences remains rooted in our existing search advertising auction," said Mr Taylor.
"Consumers are really embracing AI for shopping, driving a transition towards agentic commerce where AI can now take actions on behalf of shoppers," said Ashish Gupta, general manager and vice-president of Merchant Shopping.
He said a key focus was the expansion of Google's open-source Universal Commerce Protocol (UCP), developed with retailers to streamline AI-driven checkout experiences.
With UCP and the ability to buy directly on Google Search, including AI Mode, and the Gemini app, retailers maintain the customer relationships.
"We always think of ourselves as a matchmaker connecting shoppers directly with businesses. We are not a retailer or a marketplace, and that approach continues to guide us in this new agentic era," Mr Gupta said.
Google announced new capabilities that allow shoppers to buy multiple items directly on Google from brands, while also enabling one-click cart transfers from Google to retailer websites.
Google also released conversational attributes globally which allow merchants to update their product descriptions to reflect the more conversational way people search.
The company also plans to extend UCP-powered direct checkout capabilities to YouTube Shopping ads, allowing consumers to complete purchases directly from mobile devices and connected TVs.
