Alphabet (NASDAQ:GOOGL | GOOGL Price Prediction) has been the best of the Magnificent Seven for a reason. Whether we’re talking about the strength of its latest Gemini launch or all the new ways where Google could put its AI to work, it’s hard to be bearish about the firm, especially as investors look far beyond just search to the potential markets where Alphabet could disrupt.
Whether you’re looking for a spot in the driver’s seat with Waymo and the robotaxi rollout or applications of Gemini that many investors haven’t yet had the opportunity to think about, there are a plethora of AI drivers with the firm. And while 2026 could prove quite the challenging year for AI stocks, I still think shares of Alphabet have what it takes to buck the trend by rallying ahead, even if its peers stand still, or worse, march lower, as close to half of the Mag Seven members are doing right now.
Agentic shopping could be the next frontier in e-commerce
One of the big AI applications where Google could dominate is the field of e-commerce. Undoubtedly, it’s early days for AI agent-driven shopping, but if Google has all the right ingredients to rise out as one of the biggest winners.
The Universal Commerce Protocol (UCP) puts everything together, with major retailers having a quick and easy way for advanced AI models to find out what’s out there while pretty much eliminating the chance of a hallucination. Given that hallucinations are still a thing for modern-day large language models (LLMs), UCP could be key to making agentic shopping really work.
While there’s considerable growth runway for Google with UCP, as it showcases the goods from major retailers as well as smaller merchants running on something like the Shopify (NYSE:SHOP) platform, a huge haze of uncertainty exists as to whether agentic shopping will be something that sticks. Undoubtedly, the good, old-fashioned way of going to a retailer’s website may still be the way to go, even as AI agents become vastly more capable.
Explosive growth isn’t guaranteed, but it’s a low-risk move for Google as it finds new ways to put Gemini to work
At the end of the day, it’s more of an experience preference than anything else. Though, it is tough to match the convenience factor of having an AI agent search far and wide (and well beyond Amazon (NASDAQ:AMZN)) for a certain good (or type of good) at the best possible price. In a way, agentic shopping could simply level up Google’s Shopping tab in a big-time way. Of course, the Google Shopping tab, as it exists today, is already pretty good.
In terms of convenience and evening the e-commerce playing field, though, AI shopping could hold a ton of promise (zero-click commerce might lead to far more impulse purchases), and for Google, agentic shopping represents just another opportunity that accompanies a fairly low risk profile.
According to Morgan Stanley, agentic shoppers could hit $385 billion worth of e-commerce sales in the U.S. by 2030. That’s big, and Google and Gemini are sure to be a key part of the emerging opportunity.
If agentic shopping doesn’t turn out to be a hit and Amazon’s agentic solution (think its Rufus chatbot) keeps customers in its sticky ecosystem, it probably won’t mean all too much pain for Google, especially given the sky seems to be the limit as Google looks to apply AI in a way to drive earnings growth.
Either way, agentic commerce remains an intriguing field to watch as e-commerce, as we know it, faces a big facelift at the hands of AI agents. For those looking for a better seat in the agentic shopping boom in the coming four years, perhaps Shopify is the better way to play the boom as it wins over new revenue from the likes of a Gemini or even a ChatGPT.
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