← The Last Invention is AI
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Welcome to the podcast. I'm your host, Jaden Schaefer. Today on the podcast, I'm actually super excited. This is a really cool one coming from someone who's been in the AI marketing space for a very long time. Google has just added a whole bunch of new cool AI features to their shopping. They've also added conversational search and Agentic checkout. They also have an AI that calls stores for you. Every single one of these features I am screaming from the rooftops is awesome. So I'll try not to fanboy. This is definitely not Google fanboy, but the technology here is really cool because it solves a serious pain point for me. And I think a lot of people, if you've been following the show for a while, you know, just recently I released an episode all about Perplexity, their comment browser. They had an AI agent that could do shopping and they had a huge beef with Amazon, where Amazon basically wanted to ban them from shopping on Amazon because, I mean, basically Amazon wants to have a competing AI agent shopper. And. And so there's a whole bunch of drama in this space. The one person that it doesn't seem is being too bothered by this is Google because they have two different key components. Number one, they have the chat experience with Gemini, and number two, they actually have what is called the Google Shopping Graph, which includes over 50 billion product listings, 2 billion of which are updated every hour. And they have a ton of inventory information that is usually up to date that nobody else has. So I think Google's gonna really crush it in this space. So what exact exactly are all of the features that they have rolled out? So a lot of this stuff they actually talked about and sort of unveiled at Google IO, which I went to in San Francisco earlier this year. But you know, there's always that kind of space between them rolling out it. They're announcing a new feature and actually rolling it out. So I'm excited that a lot of this stuff is getting rolled out. Of course, a lot of these new shopping features are inside of its Gemini app. One of them is called Agentic Checkout. So Agentic Checkout, this is, I guess this is the quote from Google, what they said about it. They said, we feel it really should. Shouldn't be so tedious and shopping should feel and can feel a lot more natural and easy. The idea here is that we want to hold on to all the fun parts of shopping, like the browsing, like the serendipitous discovery and things like that, but then skip all the tedious Hard parts. Okay, so this is, this is Google's VP and GM of ads and commerce at Google that is kind of like giving us this preface of what their goal is here as far as the shopping goes. They gave a cool demo and some cool examples. One that I was interested in, they said, you know, can you recommend a face cream to fight winter chapped skin? Imagine as a user you're asking this question. It's going to have like right underneath of that, kind of like the Google Gemini or the Google AI response. I'm we're used to seeing now in the Google results where it's like for winter chap skin dermatologists recommend blah blah, blah. So it's going to have this like AI generated chat GPT response. And then right below that it says here are some top rated options at different price points. And it has products which are pulling right out of their, out of their product graph. Right. What's interesting to me here is that right now they kind of, they kind of frame this in a way where they're like, look at like how useful this is going to be. You can ask it for recommendations of products and we can actually give them to you. And I'm, I'm not going to lie, that is interesting and great as a use case. What I do see happening though more and more is right now they're just kind of showing us their cards of where this, where this goes in the future, which is that you may be talking to Gemini in the future, I believe, and it will have ads and basically products pop up inside of your conversation that maybe you didn't ask for. But they're like, this would be a great solution to your problem. But you weren't really asking like in their example you're like, can you recommend a face cream? Right in, in their example you are asking for the product and they give you the product. But I think we'll see it in the future where they just give you a product. But I mean, I'll try not to complain too much about that. I do see that as the future. One update is going to also allow that they've just rolled out is going to allow you to ask shopping questions in AI mode. So this is their conversational search feature and it's going to let you use just natural language in a very, in the, basically their Chatbot SAL interface and the responses are going to be tailored to your question and they are also going to give images when you need visual inspiration. They'll have details like prices, reviews, available inventory. So it is actually Useful in a sense that if you are talking, if you actually are trying to go shopping and you are talking to about products, it can give you a whole bunch of information about a whole bunch of products right there in your chat. So I do see that as very valuable. I'm concerned about them making it spammy. I hope they don't do that. And an interesting example of them trying to be more useful that they gave is like if you have two products you can post and boast them to Gemini and be like, hey, compare these two products and like, you know, give me side by side information. So like if you're in Google and it's, you know, you find your, your lip chap and there's two different brands, they can make a table side by side comparing the two products which like, to be honest that is a pretty interesting, useful research tool. I feel like that's something you could do with chat GPT perhaps by screenshotting the two products. But like, whatever, it is useful. They also confirmed that people that are using the AI mode are going to see sponsored listings, but as the features are still experimental, those ads aren't going to appear in the Gemini mobile app just yet. So if you are on, you know, your desktop using AI mode, you will see sponsored listings. And again, this kind of goes to some of my concerns, but whatever. I mean it's not really concerns, it's just the way the Internet works with advertising. But like they can recommend a product for you, but also there's going to be sponsored listings in there so you might get recommended something that maybe isn't the best product. It's just the product that pays the most to get in front of you. That's what I would be concerned about. But that is definitely the direction all of this is going. Another shopping update is going to let the Gemini app provide fleshed out ideas as responses and instead of just text suggestions in response to shopping related questions. So that's kind of interesting, right? You have a shopping related question and it will just give you ideas. Ideas. Google is rolling out Agentic Checkout. This is the big one that I'm excited for. It's going to be inside of Google Search. It's also included in AI mode and it's currently only available with a few different merchants. They have I think Wayfair, Chewy Quince and then a bunch of different Shopify stores that have this. So it's definitely not like on everything. And I honestly think you can get a lot of these features just using something like Comet from Perplexity or using something like Atlas from OpenAI. But anyways, Google's Google is trying to roll it out in their own way directly in Google Chrome which to be fair is, I mean, or just on Google Search. But it's basically the same thing that perplexing Atlas are doing with their own, you know, their own browsers. And so because Google has Google Chrome, I think they have a good way to, to, to kind of get into this. But to use the Agentic checkout, you can basically start by tracking an item's price and then you can have it notify you if the price drops. So that's one use use case. And so you know, like let's say you see a new bike that you really want to buy, you're just like, hey, let me know if this bike ever comes below this price. That's in my budget. It will let you know. So that's like one cool feature of the Agentix shopping. You can also opt to have Google buy the actual item for you on the website using Google Pay. Google said that it's also going to ask for your permission first before it actually confirms a purchase and, and also ask for your shipping details. I think that's fine. I think that's pretty useful though, what they specifically said about it. Lillian Rincon, VP of product management for Google Shopping was talking about this and said this is helpful for shoppers because they don't have to consistently check to see if the item they want is on sale. And it's great for retailers because it brings back the customer who might otherwise have moved on. Agentic checkout is built on Google's trust shopping graph and also gpay so you can re rest assured that you're not or that you're seeing accurate results and that your payment information is secure. Okay, I like this is kind of a limited scope of what I think a lot of people when they think of agentic shopping are hoping for. Right. I'm just hoping that hey, like go and buy all my groceries for the week. You know, here's a picture of everything in my fridge. Go buy whatever I need and like come up with meals that I can make for every week and send me like a list of what I'm going to make and have all the shopping delivered from like Amazon or from like, you know, Walmart delivery. That's what I would love to see with Agentic shopping. I don't think we're quite there yet. So Google has some things but you can see these baby steps they're taking are actually really Moving them in the right direction. One of those is that they have Google pay so they're actually going to be able to make the. Make the purchase for you. They kind of have it weird where it's just like you already picked a product and you just ask it to buy it if the product price goes down. Like, I guess it's automating the shopping for you. But I would like to just tell it to go find the product and buy it right now. Not like wait for it. I don't know how many people are like, I don't know, maybe that's a normal thing. That's just not something I've ever done. Like had a, had a shopping cart full of tool of things that I want to buy whenever they become cheap. I don't know, I just, when I need something, I just buy it and move on with my life. But I mean this is baby steps towards agentic shopping. So I will give them some kudos to that. One thing that I do think is really cool is that they have something called Let Google call inside of your listing. Like let's say you're, you know, you're talking to it about. You're like, hey, I want to learn guitar. What kind of electric guitar should I get? Blah, blah, blah. It's like talking back to you. You're like, sweet. I don't want to like order something online because it's going to take too long. Can you call all of the local guitar stores and ask them what the price is on, on like a beginner guitar? Google will actually go and call all of the stores and then it will give you an update on what it said in their example of like what it will do. Basically in the, in the thread it's like, it's like, okay, we called Strum Station. They said that they sell electric guitars and that they have models suitable for beginners that range from $179 and up. They said that they can figure out bundles with an amp and accessories. Another one, it said they also have vintage and secondhand items. So it's like really asking them like, what are your prices? What are your package deals? Do you ever have secondhand stuff? It's asking them all of these questions that you know, it has the context from your conversation. It knows what you're interested in. I think that is a phenomenal feature. Also it'd be pretty cool to just get it to call all the restaurants around you and see who has availability on a Friday night when or you know what their wait times are. Then you just Get a big list. You don't have to go call 10, 10 restaurants and you're like, oh, this one has, you know, the lowest wait time of the ones I'm interested in. And you go there. So I think this, this feature is going to be really useful. They just have an AI voice agent that goes and calls these businesses. Some people have, I've heard say that like, like people, like businesses are going to be concerned or annoyed having this AI call them. But like, honestly, as a business owner, as a, you know, I have a podcast studio in Arizona and if an AI agent called me and asked for my pricing, I mean, first of all I would hope they could just go to look at my website so they wouldn't have to bother me with that. But like if someone was interested in recording and wondering what my availability was for that day and what my price is, I mean, I would tell them just like it was a normal person. It doesn't really bother me. And then I guess maybe some people are annoyed because they feel like this is just going to use, get used to shop around, right? Like the, the AI agent can call 10 places where before you know, someone might call like two or three. So you, you put a lot more effort into sales on a phone call where you feel like they might only be calling a couple other places where it's like if it's an AI and it's going to call 10, then it's a race to the bottom on price perhaps, I don't know. So like there's concerns and questions that businesses have, but at the end of the day for, for users and consumers, I think this is a fantastic tool. And this is rolling out now in the US for a bunch of different categories, but not everything, right? So they kind of do these limited rollouts right now it's just for toys, health and beauty products and electronics. If you want to use it, you just search for products that are quote near me and then you just use the button, let Google call and then the AI is going to go and do all of that for you. I think this is exciting. Google said that they're, you know, kind of looking out for how merchants are going to experience these calls. They're trying to make sure that the chatbot isn't going to call too often and also that they make it, you know, clear about the questions that it is asking. You know, they don't want to waste people's time. Like, I don't know, you can imagine like an AI chatbot trying to do chit chat, small talk, with you and you're just trying to get your price and you're like, hey, get to the point, right? So retailers can choose to opt out of receiving those calls as well. But I mean, it's a lead, so I don't know why you'd really want to do that. I think it's, you know, likely that you will make a sale from it or there's some chance you make a sale from it. So I think a lot of people will keep that. Google executives plan to demo this technology. During a recent press conference they did, but they had WI FI issues on their end and they actually abandoned the demo. So I hope this works well, but it's so tricky with these demos when the demos crash. I mean, you do got to give them kudos. But definitely this technology is not perfect. Okay. All in all, I'm excited about the direction that Google is going with agentic shopping. Not everything is completely there yet, but you can see the direction they're taking and I hope this is really useful in the future and saves us a lot of time when it comes to shopping and buying things on Google. Thank you so much for tuning into the podcast. If you enjoyed the episode today, I would really appreciate it if you could leave a rating and review. And as always, make sure to go check out my startup AI box. AI? If you want to get all of the top AI models in one place for 20 bucks a month and you don't have to have a million subscriptions. So I hope that is useful for you and I hope you have a wonderful rest of your day. I'll catch you in the next episode.