At Google's I/O developer conference on Tuesday, the company introduced a slew of updates to search, including a new feature called "Universal Cart", an AI-powered shopping assistant that consolidates your shopping into one place under Google's Universal Commerce Protocol. One cart, multiple retailers.

The UCP is an open standard for commerce and agentic AI, co-developed alongside major retailers such as Target, Shopify, Wayfair, and Etsy. It allows them to operate on Google Pay while still giving customers access to retailer-specific data, such as loyalty programs or credit cards.

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Universal Cart gives Google's AI access to your product selections from all over its ecosystem: YouTube, Gmail, Gemini, or search, allowing it to provide insights on what you're buying, make suggestions, and open the door for all sorts of other interactions.

In a preview call ahead of I/O, Vidhya Srinivasan, Google's VP of Ads and Commerce, said these features will "make shopping more fun." What she likely means is that it reduces the barriers between "Add to cart" and "Checkout". Retailers want this to be as frictionless as possible -- instant, even -- and as personalized as possible.

The agentic AI can certainly be useful. In a live demo during I/O, Srinivasan showed a shopper adding a CPU and motherboard to their cart, only to be notified by the AI that the two devices aren't actually compatible. Good call. In another, it prompted the user to take advantage of a discount by using a different credit card.