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An AI agent burns $12 building a fake Android phone nobody asked for. From there: Pope Leo's encyclical, a tick crisis blamed on vanishing chickens, a website that's cookied Phillip into Spanish forever, and The Devil Wears Prada 2, feat. why media was the visionary all along.

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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.

• 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.
• Winning in agentic commerce starts with the fundamentals: feeds, first-party data, and UCP readiness.

• Google Marketing Live 2026 and Google I/O 2026
• Universal Cart & Universal Commerce Protocol (UCP)

• Google Imagines a Future Where Everyone Shops in Ads — A special edition of The Senses that distills the week’s key announcements
• Episode 463: LIVE @ Google I/O: Universal Cart, Agentic Payments, and the Protocols Powering the Agent-Mediated Economy — Companion interview with Suresh Ganapathy
• Episode 464: LIVE @ Google Marketing Live: How Google Is Taking the Drudgery Out of Shopping— Companion interview with Nick Fox
• Google Solidifies Its Place in the AI Race — Insiders coverage of Google's UCP debut at NRF 2026, the foundation for this week's announcements
• [Member Brief] Agentic Commerce and the eCommerce Site's New Existential Crisis — How agentic platforms are reshaping the role of the branded eCommerce site

• Learn more about
• Check out Future Commerce on YouTube
• Check out Future Commerce Plus for exclusive content and save on merch and print
• Subscribe to Insiders and The Senses to read more about what we are witnessing in the commerce world
• Listen to our other episodes of Future Commerce

Have any questions or comments about the show? Let us know on futurecommerce.com, or reach out to us on Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, or LinkedIn. We love hearing from our listeners!

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Recorded live at Google Marketing Live 2026, Phillip sits down with Nick Fox, SVP of Knowledge & Information at Google — the executive overseeing Search, Ads, Commerce, and geographic mapping products. Building on the prior day's I/O announcements, Fox unpacks how Gemini is reshaping Google's consumer and advertising products, why the Universal Cart strikes a balance between human taste and agentic convenience, and how two-plus decades at Google inform his view of building technology that shapes the lives of billions.

• Gemini 3.5 is the foundation supercharging Search, Ads, and Commerce across Google.
• The Universal Cart keeps humans choosing while agents handle the drudgery.
• UCP adoption has accelerated faster than expected across the industry.
• Conversational search has shifted user behavior toward natural, multi-word queries.
• "I think there are people that think everything's gonna be about agents talking to agents. I don't subscribe to that view." — Nick Fox
• "I am the person putting things in the cart. But then the cart is helping us agentively at the same time." — Nick Fox
• "We're building products that billions of people across the world are using. That's a responsibility we take seriously." — Nick Fox

• Google Marketing Live 2026 and Google I/O 2026
• Universal Cart & Universal Commerce Protocol (UCP)

• LIVE @ Google I/O: Universal Cart, Agentic Payments, and the Protocols Powering the Agent-Mediated Economy
• Google Solidifies Its Place in the AI Race
• [Member Brief] Agentic Commerce and the eCommerce Site's New Existential Crisis

• Check out Future Commerce on YouTube
• Check out Future Commerce Plus for exclusive content and save on merch and print
• Subscribe to Insiders and The Senses to read more about what we are witnessing in the commerce world
• Listen to our other episodes of Future Commerce

Have any questions or comments about the show? Let us know on futurecommerce.com, or reach out to us on Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, or LinkedIn. We love hearing from our listeners!

Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.