Does Google’s Agentic Partnership With Walmart Signal the End of Click-and-Buy Retail?

What’s next in commerce and retail changes almost every day. But some days bring bigger changes than others.

Sunday (Jan. 11) was one of those days, with the announcement that Google and Walmart have teamed up to embed Walmart and Sam’s Club’s vast inventory directly into Google’s artificial intelligence assistant Gemini, using Google’s Universal Commerce Protocol, and shifting retail from a static search-and-buy model toward a more conversational, AI-driven “agentic commerce” paradigm.

The goal of the partnership and launch is to eliminate the friction between want and buy by allowing shoppers to browse, personalize, and complete purchases directly through conversational AI.

During an investor call on Tuesday (Jan. 13), Daniel Danker, Walmart’s EVP of AI Acceleration, Product and Design, told the audience he “very clearly sees this as a growth opportunity,” noting that the agentic-focused partnership will continue to allow Walmart to “reach the customer where they are as commerce shifts.”

“There are so many shopping occasions that don’t begin as a shopping occasion, and this allows us to serve those moments,” Danker said.

Read also: Mid-Tier Retailers Caught Between Amazon and Walmart

From Search to Conversation to Conversion

For decades, eCommerce followed a familiar architecture: static search bars funnel customers to lists of products, and the consumer then navigates brand websites and marketplaces to complete a purchase. That model, while familiar, is increasingly at odds with modern digital behavior, where users expect fluid, intuitive interfaces that anticipate needs rather than react to queries.

Walmart and Google’s collaboration aims to invert this paradigm. Instead of typing keywords into a website, consumers will engage Gemini with natural language prompts, for example, “help me build a fall camping kit under $300,” or, “I just spilled wine on my couch, what will get it out?” Gemini will then tap into Walmart’s product catalog, pricing, and availability in real time, offering personalized recommendations and, crucially, the option to purchase without leaving the chat interface.

A cornerstone of this new experience is the Universal Commerce Protocol (UCP) — an open standard championed by Google, Walmart and other major retailers like Shopify and Wayfair, designed to streamline AI-retail interactions. In essence, UCP enables AI agents such as Gemini to access product catalogs, pricing, availability, cart handling, personalization signals and checkout functionality through a common language.

This technical groundwork is far from trivial. Retail systems are typically siloed, made up of disparate platforms that separately handle search, inventory, payment and loyalty programs. By aligning infrastructure through UCP, both Google and Walmart aim to deliver a seamless interaction in which AI can intelligently retrieve and act upon commerce data without manual integration headaches.

And the applications aren’t just tied to eCommerce; Walmart sees in-store applications as well.

“Our goal is to digitize the in-store experience as much as the online experience,” Danker said on Tuesday’s investor call. “We’re going to do less scrolling as our products understand our customers better.”

Read also: Legacy Business Models Break

The Future of Retail Is Evolving

The fireside chat and the Walmart and Google partnership touch squarely on several trends highlighted at the start of the year by PYMNTS CEO Karen Webster in her thought leadership series, “What 2026 Will Make Obvious: Ten Structural Shifts Reshaping Payments, Commerce and the AI Economy.”

Particularly, Webster said of agentic commerce, “Smart agents take the work of searching, comparing, and deciding out of the consumer’s hands and give it to software instructed to act in the consumer’s interest. That changes everything: how retailers compete, how platforms monetize, and how buying decisions are made.”

As Webster also highlighted, “Bezos popularized ‘your margin is my opportunity’ to capture Amazon’s strategy of using technology, scale and obsessive customer focus to attack incumbents’ profit pools and pass much of that surplus back to customers in the form of lower prices and better experiences. In the Prompt Economy, that instinct becomes systemic: instead of one company hunting margins, AI agents acting for millions of consumers and enterprises hunt margins everywhere, all the time.​”

She separately noted, “enough organizations crossed the line from experimentation to use that the argument about whether AI is ‘real’ has largely been resolved.”

PYMNTS Intelligence’s Prompt Economy work shows how far along this shift already is.

Nearly 70% of consumers say they are interested in using artificial intelligence agents to simplify shopping tasks; more than half would like an autonomous agent to monitor and do their weekly shopping for them, or look through personal interactions with a friend to identify and purchase a gift.

Ultimately, by bringing Walmart’s expansive inventory and fulfillment muscle into Google’s conversational AI ecosystem, both companies are making the long-term bet that the future of retail is contextual, proactive and personalized. Whether this vision becomes the dominant shopping paradigm will depend on execution, but the stakes are high, and the first moves suggest a profound shift in how consumers will interact with commerce in the years ahead.

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