Google’s AI Mode Can Now Act As a Virtual Sales Assistant.
Google really wants you to use its artificial intelligence to help you with your holiday shopping, and to that end, it’s finally enabling AI Mode and Gemini to connect you directly with products. This new feature is based on Google’s Shopping Graph—a list of 50 billion products that also appears in the Shopping tab. Starting today, it’s available to all users on both desktop and mobile devices.
Here’s how it works: in Google Search Mode or on the Gemini website/app, you can ask a question or request a physical product, such as, “Help me find an affordable, beginner-friendly espresso machine with a steam wand.” If the AI finds the relevant product information in the Shopping Graph, it will provide you with a brief description and show you several product suggestions along with purchasing information, such as prices and user reviews. Clicking on any of these tiles will open a sidebar with sites where you can buy the product.
Essentially, it’s like Google’s Shopping tab, but with a virtual shopping assistant (or, to be honest, a salesperson) you can ask for more detailed information about what you’re seeing. Some searches even allow you to check a product tile to ask further questions. For example, you can check two product tiles and ask the AI to compare them, or ask which one is cheaper or has better reviews.
Google representatives said at a press conference that the company hopes this will make it easier for shoppers to choose gifts for friends or family that are typically hard to find, and will also simplify the shopping process by allowing people to search using natural language.
My practical experience
When I tested this new tool, it generally worked, but I ran into a few issues. The most serious was that the AI had trouble recognizing certain products as topics for which it could display tiles. For example, when I searched for “Popular Nintendo Switch games under $60,” I only received a list of games, but no links to purchase them. I assume this is because the AI assumed I was simply asking for general advice on what to play, not for purchases, but no amount of rephrasing caused the tool to show me product tiles, even when I explicitly asked for them.
I also encountered issues with natural language search. At the aforementioned press conference, Google provided journalists with sample questions they could ask the AI to test the new feature, but I found that only questions that mentioned specific product types yielded clickable tiles.
For example, a query like “Suggest Christmas gift ideas for my sister who loves knitting and reading” wouldn’t trigger the new feature, but “Show me ottomans that double as coffee tables” would. Even the example Google used in its blog post announcing the feature didn’t work for me: when I searched for Christmas gift ideas for a college student who loves running, I got general answers like “running shoes” and “moisture-wicking socks,” but no specific examples of what I could buy.
This shouldn’t prevent you from receiving gift ideas from AI, but it does mean that when you’re ready to buy, you’ll need to ask a new question that’s specific to the type of product, rather than ideas for a specific person. This is an extra step to take the guesswork out of the buying process.
With these caveats in mind, I still see most users using the regular Shopping tab, where they can be sure to get product links every time. But Google hopes that integrating shopping into AI mode will ultimately give users the benefits of both approaches, allowing them to perform more accurate searches than without AI, while also allowing the AI to leverage training data that the Shopping tab doesn’t have access to, such as Reddit posts and website reviews.
Now I just need to find a way to convince my family that all my thoughtful gift ideas weren’t just dreamed up by a robot.