[00:00:00] Phillip: And welcome to Future Commerce, the podcast at the intersection of culture and commerce. I'm Phillip, and we are live at Google Marketing Live 2026. You can see the... it's hopping behind me. We're on the festival grounds here, and I'm here with Nick Fox, the SVP of Knowledge and Information at Google. Welcome to the show.

[00:00:16] Nick Fox: Thanks for having me.

[00:00:17] Phillip: And thanks for having us. We're at a pivotal point. I think we are... commerce and culture are uniquely intertwined. We see expression of culture in commerce every single day, and you guys are making it happen with some of the new announcements that have come out here at GML and at Google I/O just yesterday. We have broken some of those down already on the show. What I'd love to get into today is these two events are giving us a glimpse into your vision. Both what's happened over the last year since January with Universal Commerce Protocol and what's happening beyond. Is there an underlying theme or a narrative that you believe is connecting all of what we're hearing here at this week?

[00:00:59] Nick Fox: I think one of the big things that we're hearing across the week is how Gemini is really supercharging products across Google's consumer products as well as our advertising products as well as commerce as well. And so, you know, that starts with the Gemini 3.5 model released yesterday, Gemini 3.5 Flash, which is exciting. It's coming to search. It's coming to Gemini apps, coming to Antigravity. That's really the foundation. Today, we talked about how that's enabling app, or being enabled across our advertising suite, both in terms of ads in search, as well as, you know, the full set of advertiser products we have. From a commerce point of view, you're also seeing that there as well. And what I'm so excited about from a commerce point of view is how agentic commerce is making it easier for users to actually specify what they're looking for and find what they're looking for in ways that feel much more natural and also much more easy to transact. And I'm excited about where that's going.

[00:02:02] Phillip: Yeah. I feel like there is an excitement about where it's going, not just on the consumer side, but I feel like marketers feel like they actually have tools now, specifically what we saw today at GML with pulling the experience. We talked about the collapse of the funnel for years, but pulling the experience of the purchase directly into the ad at the moment of inspiration. And I think one of the remarkable things about the wave of AI empowering businesses as humans is we believe that there's this era of the autonomous organization. Right? That we're heading into. And that comes at a moment where the individual is becoming more sovereign than ever, away from the institutions maybe they relied on in the past. Do you think that innovation... or how do you prioritize the innovation that serves both areas effectively?

[00:02:50] Nick Fox: Well, I think one thing that... I think there are people that think that agents will be sort of everything, and everything's new about agents talking to agents. I don't subscribe to that view. I think one of the things that makes us all special is that we're people, we're humans, we have tastes, we have preferences. You know, if I'm looking to buy a shirt or buy a pair of shoes, you know, maybe some of my purchases I don't care that much about, but a lot of the purchases that, you know, this shirt is an expression of my taste, it's an expression of who I am. And similarly, you know, even outside the notion of commerce, you know, I don't subscribe to the view that AI means the web goes away because I think people like watching podcasts or listening to podcasts or, you know, reading articles and reading reviews and things like that. So I believe we need to build for both. I think I'm excited about the agentic moment. I'm excited about how agents can help us, you know, deal with a lot of the, you know, the drudgery and a lot of things we sort of have to do. But I think it's also really important to design for people and design for humans and continue to do that, because I think that's what makes us special, and I think it's important to design for that.

[00:04:12] Phillip: Yeah. There's a bunch of announcements, and we'll have covered a lot of them. So make sure you go check out all of the coverage. Which of the announcements or developments do you think serve as sort of a connecting point that brings businesses closer to consumers, either through search or advertising or commerce? Is there anything in particular that you think really stands out that brings those two things together?

[00:04:36] Nick Fox: I think one thing I'll call out is the universal cart. Mhmm. So we announced that yesterday. We talked more about it today. What I think is so exciting about the universal cart, so it's universal in that it shows up across and can move with you across Google. So you can use it in search. You can use it in a Gemini app. You'll be able to use it in Gmail and in YouTube. And it's also universal across merchants. And the reason that matters is, you know, generally shopping journeys are kind of messy. Right? They're not linear, and I might buy, you know, be looking at one thing on one side, another thing on another side, and all these are coming together. And so the universal cart is sort of a hub, and it can bring all... it can bring these shopping journeys together. What I think is so powerful about it is it really goes back to what I was just talking about. I am the person putting things in the cart. The user is the person putting things in the cart. We're choosing what to buy, but then the cart is helping us agentically at the same time. It's looking... it can look across and say, hey, these two things don't work together. Mhmm. There's an incompatibility here, or this thing was out of stock, now it's in stock, or this thing just got a price drop. These are things that technology can be very helpful with, that agentic technology can be helpful with because I'm not gonna look at every site, you know, day in and day out and figure out, you know, when the price is changing. And then it connects back to UCP, which you mentioned earlier, and that enables the transaction in a super simplest way. So my point of view is that the universal cart is kind of that right balance where it's enabling people to be people and enabling the technology to take care of the drudgery.

[00:06:16] Phillip: If I believe some of the social listening tools that we employ at Future Commerce, it seems like there's a lot of excitement both in the industry from a consumer perspective on that announcement yesterday. So really excited to see it actually play out, especially in all the areas where it's going to show up because that's where consumers spend a lot of their time. And that UCP powers most of those experiences. It's the underlying protocol. Right? So that's an important milestone for Google. We've talked a lot about it since NRF. What milestones for the broader ecosystem have you achieved to support the growth and evolution of agentic commerce? Are there ones that you think are really important, or the ones to come that are product related or technology related? What do you think are the steps... step wise to get us to a more agentic future? Is it adoption? Give me a little bit of that.

[00:07:08] Nick Fox: Yeah. Maybe there's two things that I'll call out. One is, I think where we've gotten with the ability to ask the questions in a natural way. The Gemini models, particularly how that's showing up in AI Mode, how that's showing up in the Gemini app, it's a leap forward in terms of how you can search and actually find what you're looking for. So I think that first part of it, I think the milestones have been good and we're seeing that in terms of user behavior starting to shift in that direction. On the transaction side, I've been blown away at the adoption of UCP. Right? How... you know, it's so important for something at the transaction level to be really universal across the industry, and it's been amazing to see... you know, we took a very ecosystem approach in building it, sort of recognizing that was the only way it would work. Sure. We came together with, you know, I won't be able to name them all, but Shopify and Stripe and Walmart and Target and, you know, more recently, Meta's onboard. Amazon. Amazon's onboard. So it's really neat to see how that's all come together. Now, early days in terms of all that getting deployed, but in terms of where it is, it's... it blew me away how the industry has come together and really shaped this into something that I think will be transformative for commerce.

[00:08:30] Phillip: We always up level conversation in with executives like yourself. We really think that that's the conversation that isn't had very often. What areas of agentic commerce are you seeing or do you believe are gaining the...

[00:08:47] Nick Fox: Most...

[00:08:47] Phillip: Traction? Are there... because I believe it leads to social change, economic change, there's psychological change factors. One of those, I think, is evidenced by the way that people are changing the way they search, which we heard about earlier today. What are the factors that are driving progress, and is it changing how we interact with technology?

[00:09:07] Nick Fox: I think the biggest thing is how it's changed how people search, and you mentioned that. But I've been surprised. I've been, like, quite delightfully surprised at how quickly the way that people search has changed. It used to be the case that people gave us one or two or three words in a query. It was like, the query was just one thing and that was it. And it was very hard to do follow ups and all those kind of stuff. The way that searching has become conversational has become much more natural. People can use, yeah, all of the words that make sense to them in their heads, and they don't have to worry about translating that into the words that a search engine or machine can understand. I think that's been really neat. I think that is... I think it's both technical. I think it's also societal. Right? It's the way... it almost gets to the way that we think about things. So I've been quite delighted by that because we can build the technology, but it doesn't matter if you build the technology if there isn't an option there. And so seeing technology that actually connects and makes all this stuff easier for people is really what it's all about.

[00:10:20] Phillip: Yeah. There's probably... informed a little bit by your wealth of experience. You've been with Google for over two decades. Right? You're helping shape vision, I think, more than just technology. I'd love to understand this vision and how the vision for you... you personally, how your experience is bringing this idea that essentially you've embedded... Google is embedded into consumers' lives. It is part of our everyday life. I have a Pixel phone. My kids have Pixel phones. Like, we grow up with this technology now. It's part of our everyday life. And that our relationship to that technology is changing too. How do you see that and how does it approach your perspective on your work? How does that make you... and how does that differ from the work that you did twenty years ago?

[00:11:17] Nick Fox: You know, it's a great question. It's a really nice question. Because I think about this a lot actually. And the reason I think about this is, you know, where I am and my team is very aware that we're building products that billions of people across the world are using. Right? And that's a responsibility that we take seriously, because we realize the implications of this technology. We realize that it does shape society. It does shape what people do. It shapes how people spend their time. It shapes how people transact. It shapes all of these things. That wasn't really quite the case, you know, twenty five years ago. It was a much smaller product, and, you know, the implications were different. But, like, we're very cognizant that the decisions we make or the way that we build or the way that we design has these broader implications. And so how does that play out? Well, we don't make decisions lightheartedly. We listen a lot. We test a lot with, you know, user research and other mechanisms to make sure that we're steering the technology responsibly.

[00:12:36] Phillip: And how do you support and empower your team to bring that same sort of vision into their work every day?

[00:12:45] Nick Fox: You know, it is one part of it. I talk a lot internally about the importance of being humble. Mhmm. You know, that what we know is what we don't know. It's important to be humble about what we don't know. It's important to be humble about the responsibility that we play. But what I'll say beyond that is the teams naturally feel this responsibility. Right? And it's so... it's not so much I need to, you know, tell folks. You know, I'm blown away every day, you know, sitting in conversations where I see it directly and I see the responsibility that people take. And so it's not even something that I need to instill. It's just part of the culture. It's part of how we operate. Sure.

[00:13:34] Phillip: This is my first GML. This is my first Google I/O. But we've spent the last ten years of Future Commerce covering these events, and our second ever podcast was covering Google I/O. I remember back in the conversational commerce days, and it's really interesting to see that a lot of what we talked about back then is finally coming into fruition. Congrats on the launches. It's been four... just four or five months since the UCP. Yeah. I'd love to check in again with you in four or five months and see where we're at at that point. Nick Fox, thank you so much.

[00:14:08] Nick Fox: Thanks for your time. Appreciate it. Appreciate it.