A new shopping platform from Google is advancing AI’s role in the retail world. The company’s “Universal Cart” allows customers to add items to their cart found through Google Search, Gemini, Gmail and YouTube, then receive buying recommendations and suggestions from Google’s AI.“Universal Cart is an intelligent shopping cart and your new hub for shopping on Google,” the company said about Universal Cart’s launch earlier this month. “[It] also uses intelligent reasoning to anticipate your needs and help solve problems before they arise.”The new shopping platform will be available across Google Search and Gemini this summer, followed by YouTube and Gmail. Major brands such as Nike, Sephora, Target, Walmart and Wayfair will integrate with Universal Cart at checkout.Google’s new technology represents an unfolding era in AI-powered shopping that helps improve buying choices with little effort from the shopper.A new shopping platform from Google will integrate major brands such as Nike and Sephora (Getty Images)When a customer adds an item to their Universal Cart, the platform’s AI will work behind the scenes on time-consuming tasks normally left for consumers. It will find deals and alert shoppers to price drops, provide information about price history and send alerts when an out-of-stock item comes back in stock, Google said. Universal Cart will also alert shoppers to cart items that may be incompatible – the wrong part for a stove, for example – and show users how they can earn points and rewards using payment options saved to their Google Wallet. Consumers have increasingly turned to AI to help them shop. This past year, generative AI tools like Chat GPT “drove a 893.4 percent increase in traffic to retail sites” during the holiday season, Adobe noted in a January analysis.“This 2025 holiday season, consumers embraced generative AI more than ever as a shopping assistant in their purchasing decisions,” Adobe Digital Insights Lead Analyst Vivek Pandya wrote in the analysis. AI essentially acts as a professional shopping assistant, translating the user’s needs and preferences into relevant product suggestions. “Better search, clearer product information, and faster answers help shoppers find the right products more often, which drives more completed purchases,” Columbia Business School wrote in December 2025.Google Head of Search Liz Reid is one of many company leaders pushing for AI integration into shopping tools (AFP via Getty Images)Prominent companies such as Salesforce and Mastercard have implemented AI agents on their sales and shopping platforms, respectively, to drive engagement and purchases, University of Buffalo law school professor Mark Bartholomew pointed out in May in university research-news piece Critics say that AI-assisted shopping platforms like Universal Cart bring up important ethical concerns, including undisclosed conflicts of interest. “Perhaps the least-settled, yet most crucial question is whether AI shopping tools will be designed and regulated to serve users’ interests and human flourishing – or optimized, as so many digital tools before them, primarily for corporate profit,” Bartholomew wrote.