Google spent most of 2023 looking like a company that had missed its moment. Now it’s the one throwing punches.
Over the past six months, Sundar Pichai’s company has rolled out an agentic shopping protocol, a cross-service checkout system, a viral image generator that nearly broke its own servers, and signed a Pentagon deal to put its AI models on classified work. Gemini now accounts for a quarter of all AI traffic worldwide, up from 6% a year ago. In January, Alphabet became only the fourth company in history to hit a $4 trillion market cap, after Nvidia, Apple and Microsoft.
OpenAI started this fight. Google is finishing it — or trying to.
The Shopping Cart That Eats Everything
The most aggressive move came in May, when Google unveiled Universal Cart, an intelligent shopping cart that works across retailers and services. It bolts onto Search, Gemini, YouTube and Gmail. Add a pair of sneakers in one place, check out in another. Universal Cart hunts for price drops using Gemini, then settles up through Google Pay.
It rides on top of the Universal Commerce Protocol, or UCP, which Google launched in January and has been quietly expanding ever since. Buy-now-pay-later. Loyalty pricing. The whole catalog of e-commerce tricks, wired into the surfaces where billions of people already live.
Ashish Gupta, Google’s vice president and general manager of merchant shopping, framed it carefully at a virtual roundtable ahead of Google Marketing Live last month: “We are not a retailer, we are not a marketplace, and that approach continues to guide us in this agentic era as well.”
That framing is doing a lot of work. Because what Google is really chasing is the money sloshing around social commerce — TikTok Shop drove nearly $5 billion in U.S. sales last year, and Meta has been testing its own AI shopping research tool since March. “I think they’re seeing the massive volume of transactions and shopping in commerce come out TikTok Shop, and coming out of Meta, and they’re saying, ‘We want a piece of that,'” said Phil Case, president and chief client officer at Max Connect Digital.
OpenAI tried this. Its Instant Checkout feature in ChatGPT — which let users pay merchants directly inside the app — is now defunct. Amazon swallowed its old Rufus assistant into Alexa+ and bolted it onto its shopping experience earlier this month. Everyone wants the same thing: to be the layer between you and your wallet.
Consumers, for what it’s worth, remain skeptical. Recent surveys show a majority find letting AI access their shopping history unappealing, with particular unease about how that data might get used.
The Quiet Man Running It
Pichai tells a story about scuba diving in Hawaii with his family, getting pummeled by surface waves, then kicking downward to find what he called “the calmest place in the world.”
“I feel that in any situation, there is a layer which is super calm — in which, if you can get there, you can observe what’s going on,” he told a reporter in April at Google’s Mountain View headquarters. “And your mind’s energy is focused on what you need to do.”
That’s the brand. Pichai — who could earn $692 million over the next three years depending on stock performance — is not Musk, not Zuckerberg, not Altman. He doesn’t tweet through it. When ChatGPT landed in late 2022 and analysts were writing Google’s obituary, he just waited. He had declared Google an “AI-first company” back in 2016. The bets on custom chips, Cloud, YouTube and DeepMind were already placed.
“I was under the belief that they just had lost their chops. Think about Yahoo! Or eBay,” said Gene Munster, managing partner at Deepwater Asset Management. “Once you lose that drive for being willing to sacrifice your golden geese for better ways to do anything, it’s almost impossible to come back.”
Alphabet’s stock climbed 62% in 2025. Capital expenditures for the year landed between $91 billion and $93 billion. The golden geese are fine.
Nano Banana and the Melting TPUs
The other person to know here is Josh Woodward.
The Google veteran, who joined as a product marketing intern in 2009, was promoted in April 2025 to run the Gemini app while keeping his job atop Google Labs. The promotion came at a rocky moment — Alphabet shares had just plunged 18% in the first quarter of 2025, the stock’s worst stretch since 2022. Demis Hassabis, the Nobel Prize-winning CEO of Google DeepMind, told staff in a memo that Woodward would focus on the “next evolution” of the app.
Then came Nano Banana. The image generator launched in late August 2025 and lets people blend photos into personal digitized figurines. It went viral within days. Infrastructure buckled. By the end of September, the Gemini app had generated billions of images.
Clay Bavor, who used to run Google Labs, said Woodward’s ability to break down internal bureaucracy “has landed him right at the center of the most important work at Google.”
NotebookLM. Waymo. Image tools inside Search. Translate. The empire Pichai built in the quiet years is now the distribution Google is using to flood every consumer surface with Gemini at once — and to make sure that when someone wants to buy something, ask something or watch something, they never have to leave.
The Pentagon deal, announced this spring, was the part Pichai didn’t volunteer.