At NRF 2026, Google Cloud made two announcements worth unpacking. They mark an important milestone for the search giant and signal concierge agents coming of age.
First, Gemini Enterprise for Customer Experience (CX). It is an agentic framework that enables businesses to build shopping agents that behave like concierges, managing the end-to-end commerce experience from discovery through post-purchase support.
Agentic AI took digital commerce by storm in 2025. It made inroads, replacing rigid, rule-based chatbots and chat systems that too often connect customers to outsourced agents who lack context and knowledge to address customer questions. Offering agentic concierges was a key driver of Sierra’s rapid trajectory, helping it cross the $100M ARR milestone so quickly. In the B2B world, autonomous SDRs enjoy a similar momentum.
Probably the most important aspect of these agentic concierges is that they enable new experiences that erase the historical divide between pre- and post-sales. This is among the first examples of AI enabling things that were not previously possible. Before AI, businesses had to segment experiences by departmental boundaries, exposing customers to the structure of their organization.
As part of Google’s effort to bring shopping and customer service experiences together, Gemini Enterprise for CX integrates with Agent Assist to support hand-offs to human agents, providing real-time coaching, next-best-action guidance, and training.
Surprisingly, the announcement made no mention of Google Customer Engagement Suite. Separately, Five9 introduced an integrated solution that combines its CX Platform with Gemini Enterprise for CX.
Google also unveiled a new standard, the Universal Commerce Protocol (UCP), which it has open-sourced. It is the company’s response to OpenAI’s Agentic Commerce Protocol (ACP), also released in open source in September 2025.
UCP supports the full shopping journey by integrating with e-commerce and payment systems. The Native path enables customers to use the AI Mode in Google Search or the Gemini app, what Google refers to as its “surfaces,” while the Embedded path allows merchants to deploy their own shopping agents. UCP goes far beyond replacing site scraping to cover discovery, pricing, checkout, payment, and post-purchase services. Google has already secured support from 20 commerce ecosystem leaders, including Shopify, Target, and Walmart.
These announcements signal not only Google going on the offensive to redefine digital commerce, but also the coming of age of agentic commerce. For concierge agents, which are today focused on handling informational inquiries, this clearly charts the path toward expanding into fully transactional interactions.