At the recent NRF event, the headline was shopping in answer engines, with Google’s new Gemini Enterprise for Customer Experience and Universal Commerce Protocol getting lots of attention. However, tucked below the fold was important news for CX and contact center leaders: the announcement of Google’s Cloud Customer Experience Agent Studio.

Customer service and CX leaders would be forgiven if they glossed over this latest announcement from Google. Many of the customer service features it announced are practically table stakes for contact center–as-a-service vendors, such as providing real-time contextual guidance to live reps and real time QA.

Similarly on the commerce side, it would be easy to write this off as another “agentic commerce” offering. Announcements of exclusive partnerships between commerce or payments vendors and answer engines (e.g., ChatGPT, Google Gemini, Perplexity) seem to come daily. It’s worth nothing that although Google and others claim to have agentic solutions, “agentic commerce” is an often-inaccurately-used term. Most likely, “agentic” refers to the use of agents to execute direct requests from users/customers, like finding products that match a query. These are assistive, conversational experiences, and are less likely to act autonomously, which is the requirement for the “agentic” moniker.

What’s Actually New

What is newsworthy is the connection between ecommerce, customer service, and insights. Are the days of repeating ourselves ad nauseum as we move between multiple customer service channels and reps finally over? Connecting disparate data silos is the perpetual thorn in the side of organizations that try to deliver contextual experiences.

The new offering from Google, coupled with the “Personal Intelligence” feature (in beta) offers the promise of a single platform that has both the data and the customer-facing layer to deliver contextual interactions. CX leaders should help organizations avoid the trap of buying a box of CX — as creating effective, connected experiences requires a sound strategy just as much as the tech to deliver.

This announcement may be the first major moment for customer service finding its way into answer engine shopping, and we hope it’s not the last.

What It Means

If you’re in retail or food service, review Google’s roadmap — several features are still in beta. For all industries, track how hyperscalers are reshaping business applications. Understanding these shifts today will help you prepare for future impacts on your technology ecosystem and customer experience strategy.

If you want help interpreting these developments or planning your response, reach out to discuss how this fits into your CX priorities.