Gap Teams With Google for Agentic Clothing Shopping

Gap has reportedly launched an agentic commerce partnership with Google’s Gemini.

This collaboration will let shoppers check out directly from Google’s artificial intelligence (AI) platform, CNBC reported Tuesday (March 24). It makes Gap the first major fashion brand to work with Google in this manner, the report added.

The network notes the partnership is happening as consumers increasingly use AI platforms to find new products, which has left retailers reexamining their marketing strategies.

“It’s not just keyword search anymore, right? It’s conversations, and so we need to be relevant to that,” Gap Chief Technology Officer Sven Gerjets told CNBC.

“Is it, you know, ‘I’m trying to figure out what to do for a wedding, what are the things I should be looking at?’ Or, ‘I’ve got a job interview, are there some styles I should wear?’ All of those things we need to become relevant to.”

According to the report, the partnership works like this: When a shopper searches for an article of clothing using Gemini, and the AI thinks some of Gap’s products are a match, shoppers will be able to purchase those items within Gemini without being redirected to Gap’s website. Google Pay handles the checkout, while Gap takes care of shipping and other logistics.

Product information provided to shoppers won’t be crawled from Gap’s site, CNBC added, but will be details that Gap provided to Gemini beforehand. This allows Gap to control for accuracy, keep collecting customer data and exercise greater control over the customer experience.

PYMNTS Intelligence research from earlier this year found that 41% of consumers have used dedicated AI platforms for product discovery.

“More striking is that a third say they have fully replaced their prior methods. They are not layering AI on top of old habits,” PYMNTS CEO Karen Webster wrote in a column last week. “They shut the door on the old way and left.”

That column, titled “Why AI Shopping Is Still Just a Smarter Search Bar,” looks at the limitations of agentic commerce.

“What the past year revealed is that the gap between consumer readiness and commercial infrastructure is wider than most of the predictions of 2024 acknowledged,” Webster wrote. “The technology moved faster than anyone anticipated. The commerce plumbing did not.”

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