Suresh Ganapathy, Senior Director of Product, Consumer Shopping: Live Google I/O Interview

Today at Google I/O, in her part of the larger keynote, VP/GM of Ads and Commerce, Vidhya Srinivasan announced a raft of Agentic Commerce items with the anchor new feature being Universal Cart. After Vidhya’s keynote comments, I was left with these questions that I know merchants will have too:Googlers talk about Universal Cart being available on surfaces like Gmail and YouTube - what’s that actually look like IRL? What are the use cases that merchants can think about and start experimenting with?Universal Cart is coming this Summer - that’s typically June/July/August - that’s a long window in AI-time, early/mid/late Summer?I haven’t heard Google, at least the Agentic Commerce team, talk about AG2 in a while, and suddenly it popped back up in the context of the new consumer agent called Gemini Spark. What’s that all about that.Loyalty (via identity linking) was part of the UCP features announced back on March 19th (details here) but kind of missing here? Even though if you read Vidhya’s blog post very carefully it says that Universal Cart uses “loyalty information”, but it’s not like the Copilot UCP-based loyalty linkage we saw with Target back on April 22 (here if you missed it).That’s a lot of questions - I only had 30mins with Suresh, so had to pick and choose, but we covered some good ground. The good news is I have two more interviews scheduled for Wed 20th at Google Marketing Live and will work them all in.Subscribe, engage and stay tuned for more great Google I/O content coming at you all week! 👉 Connect with Suresh Ganapathy: https://www.linkedin.com/in/sureshsganapathy/👉 Learn more about Google I/O: https://io.google/2026/🧠 Want to stay ahead in AI commerce? Subscribe and follow along:📰 Subscribe to the free Substack: retailgentic.ai📺 Watch episodes on YouTube & Subscribe for updates: https://www.youtube.com/@Retailgentic