Google is rolling out a suite of AI shopping updates just ahead of the holiday season. The company on Thursday unveiled a host of new tools and features, including conversational shopping in Google Search, new shopping features within its Gemini app, agentic checkout, and even an AI tool that can call local stores to find out if a product you want is available.
The company believes the additions will help improve the online shopping experience, which can still today involve a lot of drudgery, explained Vidhya Srinivasan, VP and GM of ads and commerce at Google, in a press briefing ahead of the launch.
“We feel it really shouldn’t be so tedious, and shopping should feel — and can feel — a lot more natural and easy,” she said. “The idea here is we want to hold on to all the fun parts of shopping, like the browsing, like the serendipitous discovery, and things like that, but then skip all the tedious, hard parts.”
Image Credits:Google
One update will allow consumers to ask shopping questions in AI Mode, Google’s conversational search feature that lets you use natural language queries in a chatbot-style interface. The responses will be tailored to your question, and the chatbot will provide images when you need visual inspiration, alongside other details like price, reviews, and available inventory.
So if you were looking for cozy sweaters in autumn colors, you’d see photos of the options available to you. But if you were comparing items, like skin care products, Google may instead return insights in a comparison table.
Image Credits:Google
Google noted that AI Mode is powered by its Shopping Graph, which includes over 50 billion product listings, 2 billion of which are updated every hour, and said the inventory information you see is usually up-to-date.
Another shopping update will enable the Gemini app to provide fleshed-out ideas as responses, instead of just text suggestions in response to shopping-related questions. This is only available to users in the U.S. currently.
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