Paweł Josiek
Co-Founder & COO | SVP at Solita Poland
In January 2026, analyzing the opinions of retail company representatives in Future Mind's "Retail Barometer," we pointed to a worrying picture of the market: almost half of retailers were not planning to implement agentic commerce, and one in four was undecided. We wrote at the time, plainly: "The industry approaches this idea with considerable caution, treating it more as a distant innovation or a trend to observe rather than a concrete action plan for the near future. This cautious approach may turn out to be risky if AI technology continues to develop at its current pace." Meanwhile, just five months later, Google is announcing Universal Cart: an intelligent shopping cart operating across Search, Gemini, YouTube, and Gmail, with direct checkout via Google Pay.
A feature like this within the Google ecosystem is potentially the most significant change in e-commerce infrastructure in years. Universal Cart is expected to be available as early as summer 2026, not as a beta, but as a full-fledged product with partners such as Nike, Sephora, Target, and Walmart.
Retailers therefore no longer have quarters to observe the development of agentic commerce. The window for preparing on their own terms is closing faster than most organizations assume.
Universal Cart and the Universal Commerce Protocol behind it run on structured data. This means that for a product offered by a given store to even be included in Google's ranking, its categories, attributes, and descriptions must meet specific standards.
A store with an incomplete catalog, missing attributes, or inconsistent categorization simply will not appear in AI agent recommendations or in the UCP-powered checkout, that is, in exactly the place where more and more transactions will take place.
Where does the assumption come from that UCP will become the standard? Of course, no one can be one hundred percent certain here.
But Google is a digital giant with 60 billion listings in its Shopping Graph, plus synergistic solutions such as Google Pay and Google Wallet, which hold data on cards and loyalty programs. On top of that, it is the only company of such scale on the market that intends to combine these elements into a single ecosystem. OpenAI has stepped back from finalizing purchases within ChatGPT, and Anthropic is not entering the consumer segment for now, so Google's move inevitably appears to have high potential.
The industry has been through this many times before. Changes to the Google Search algorithm have been capable of drastically reducing, within weeks, organic traffic built up over years. Brands that had invested in outdated SEO techniques would one day wake up wondering what had happened to their visibility. With the introduction of UCP, the situation may be similar, except that what is at stake is not so much position in search results, but visibility in a shopping channel served by an AI agent.
Stores that understand the logic of UCP earlier and properly structure their catalog and data will win on visibility. Just as those who took Google's recommendations on SEO and website user experience seriously ahead of the competition were the ones who won out.
From the perspective of a company that regularly talks with e-commerce businesses and studies their approaches to technology development, we see a clear divide. Some organizations treat product data and architecture as a task for "someday," alongside dozens of other priorities. Others understand that this is not an IT whim, but a business decision about whether they will be visible in a new sales channel.
Companies that do not put their product data in order over the coming months and do not start tracking the evolution of UCP may discover, a year from now, that the new sales channel is growing, but without them. Once again, it may turn out that Google sets the rules of the game in digital, and ignoring them means playing with fire.
K. Szmaj - VP of Strategy & Design
K. Borowiec - Business Development Manager
E. Waszkowski - VP of Commercial Development
A. Rakowski - Partner Relationship Manager
