Google already has search, shopping, autofill and payments; now it wants Gemini to connect them into an agentic checkout experience. Google has been expanding its Universal Commerce Protocol, adding partners including Meta, Microsoft, Stripe, Klarna and Affirm in recent weeks. I/O is expected to further show how that infrastructure could enable end-to-end agentic checkout, where Gemini does not just answer a shopping query, but completes a transaction. Sameer Samat, president of Android Ecosystem at Google, described asking Gemini to plan a barbecue, build a menu, open Instacart, add ingredients to a Safeway cart and notify him when the task was done.If there is one theme running through the I/O session lineup, it is AI Agents. Google has several sessions on agentic coding workflows, multimodal tools, media generation, robotics and AI agents. The goal is to position Gemini as not just a chatbot but more of an operating layer across Google’s products, capable of understanding context and taking action. Do you think that Google has an upperhand in AI field since it controls the search engine ?
