Google I/O is going on today and tomorrow and they just announced a vast array of new products and services (Google CEO’s blog). Today’s blog is a quick drill down on payments and specifically what “Buy for me with GPay” means for the payment ecosystem (and agentic commerce).
As discussed in Commercial Models for AI Agents, the network and economics surrounding agentic commerce is far from settled. The lack of a clear commercial model and a robust trust framework has impeded Agentic’s growth as commerce is a multi-sided network. Google’s strategy appears to directly address these deficiencies by deeply integrating GPay as a core component of its agentic offerings. This integration aims to provide the necessary layers of trust, security, and transactional capability that have been missing. It also may provide an additional pricing mechanism for agentic transactions.
As outlined in today’s Stratechery the “lack of payments” were part of the original sin of the internet. A “sin” that Google is fixing in Agentic by creating a complex network that unites search, ML, agent-based action, payments, advertising network, billions of devices, consumer-controlled data for personalization, which will redefine eCommerce (and recapture product search). The price of entry? Merchants need to add the GPay button.
To be clear, merchants will still endeavor to use AI in order to create a better customer experience for those customers that enter their domain. But for consumers, the Google offering will be hard to beat as Google leverages their data and preferences across every device to enable customer interaction through purchase. While Amazon will likely maintain a solid position, most consumers will not start search within a merchant domain. Agentic originated transactions present a new type of demand, fully qualified consumers with a valid payment instrument and transaction request. A transaction type that should operate in a 100% conversion model (ie no abandonment). With GPay, Google provides the consumer authentication and risk data for merchants to decision the transaction.
Recapturing Product Search – Interaction and Action
Central to Google’s commerce strategy are AI-Powered Shopping features and Agentic Checkout (see Google’s Shopping Blog). These include the new AI Mode in Search, which leverages Google’s vast Shopping Graph (containing over 50 billion products) and offers innovative features like virtual try-on, where users can see how clothes would look on them using an uploaded photo. The “agentic checkout feature,” often referred to as “buy for me,” empowers the AI to purchase products using payment and delivery details stored in GPay. This system can also track product prices and automatically execute a purchase when a user-defined price point is met.

Google is strategically architecting an ecosystem where its AI agents, powered by sophisticated models like Gemini and deeply integrated with user data across its authenticated surfaces, will drive a new era of “Agentic Commerce.” Within this ecosystem, Google Pay (GPay) is being positioned not merely as another payment option but as an indispensable infrastructure layer. This layer is designed to enable transactions, manage risks, and convey trust, thereby creating a powerful flywheel effect for Google’s interconnected services. Where merchants were reluctant to add the GPay button before, the coat tails of agentic search AND qualified demand will likely prompt adoption.
The timing of Google’s intensified push into agentic commerce, coupled with advancements in GPay’s security and functionality, is not a matter of coincidence. It represents a strategic response to the maturation of AI capabilities and a proactive move to define the transactional rails for the AI Era. As AI models like Google’s Gemini become significantly more capable of understanding complex user intent and context , the core promise of agentic AI to “do things for me” increasingly involves transactional tasks like purchasing. Historically, the payment step has been a point of friction for AI agents. Google’s recent I/O 2025 announcements, however, heavily featured AI agents taking direct action, including making purchases. IMHO this indicates a clear strategy: Google intends for GPay to evolve into the embedded, payment platform that makes these agentic actions seamless and secure, thereby surmounting previous limitations.
Leveraging User Data – The Consumer is in CONTROL
A cornerstone of Google’s AI strategy is the ability of its agents to integrate and interpret vast amounts of user history. This data, sourced from Gmail, past purchases, chat logs, location history, and documents, allows the AI to understand user context deeply and take highly personalized actions. Project Astra, for example, explicitly incorporates “Personalized reasoning,” which uses deep reasoning and memory to build a rich understanding of user preferences, thereby tailoring shopping recommendations. It also features “Content retrieval,” allowing it to access user-provided data like PDF manuals or recipes to offer specific assistance. Similarly, the AI Mode in Google Search is set to launch a “Personal Context” feature, which will draw upon past searches and data from other Google products like Gmail to inform its suggestions.
The depth and breadth of Google’s cross-platform user data represent a formidable competitive advantage in the race to create truly effective and personalized AI agents. This “data moat” allows for a level of contextual understanding that standalone AI models or services from competitors will find exceedingly difficult to match and translates into more relevant, successful, and ultimately trusted agentic commerce experiences. While competitors may boast strong AI models, they often lack this continuous, authenticated stream of user data across such a wide array of touchpoints. Consequently, Google’s ability to create highly personalized and effective AI agents for commerce is significantly amplified by its unique data ecosystem, creating a strong competitive barrier.
Recapturing Initiative and Redefining Search
By offering a more integrated, conversational, and actionable search-to-commerce experience, Google aims to keep users within its ecosystem for the entire journey. This marks a significant evolution from the traditional “10 blue links” of search results towards a model where AI directly facilitates task completion, including purchases.
This strategy also involves redefining Google’s platform across its multitude of authenticated surfaces, such as Google Home, Google TV, Android, and Chrome. These are no longer viewed as disparate products but as interconnected touchpoints that provide AI agents with the contextual understanding necessary to both gain insights and take meaningful action.
Google is not merely building AI features; it is architecting a new, pervasive user interaction layer that spans all its major platforms. This vision of “ambient computing,” powered by intelligent AI agents, seeks to make Google an indispensable part of the user’s daily digital and, increasingly, physical life, with commerce being a key activity within that life. Google possesses numerous user touchpoints, from Android devices and the Chrome browser to Search, Home, TV, Gmail, and Maps. AI agents like Astra are explicitly designed with cross-device memory and operational capabilities. Gemini, the core AI model, is being integrated deeply into Chrome and other Workspace tools, reinforcing the idea of a “universal AI assistant”. This creates a cohesive ecosystem where user intent captured on one surface (e.g., a smart display) can be seamlessly acted upon by an agent on another (e.g., an Android phone for payment confirmation or autonomous purchase). This continuous, integrated presence in the user’s life naturally increases the opportunities for agentic commerce to occur within Google’s domain
GPay Wallet
The strategic direction for GPay is now shifting. It is transitioning from being just another digital wallet to becoming a critical infrastructural component for Google’s ambitious AI-driven commerce initiatives. The consolidation of consumer-facing payment features into Google Wallet, while retaining the GPay branding for merchant-facing services and API-driven transactions (such as the new “agentic checkout”), is a calculated strategic maneuver. This approach streamlines the user experience by presenting Google Wallet as the core engine powering Google’s new commerce initiatives.
The previous, somewhat fragmented, branding and app strategy might have hindered merchant adoption, however “Buy for me with GPay” will change that as the only reason to add a button is to drive incrmental sales and GPay is set to become the payment rail for Google’s AI agents. The good news for Visa and Mastercard? It’s all card today, as merchants remain the entities taking the risk and processing the payment.
GPay as the New Trust Anchor:
Google is strategically positioning GPay, augmented with robust authentication and verification mechanisms, to serve as a new trust anchor across all surfaces.
- FIDO-based ‘Sign in with Google’ and Passkeys: Google’s strong push towards adopting FIDO standards and passkeys for user authentication is a critical element.62 Passkeys offer phishing-resistant authentication and inherently prove possession of the user’s registered device or authenticator.64 When a user authenticates their Google Account (which is intrinsically linked to their GPay information) using a FIDO passkey, it generates strong, reliable signals of user presence and explicit consent. Even if an AI agent subsequently initiates a transaction based on this authenticated session, the underlying strength of the initial FIDO-based authentication provides a high degree of assurance.
- GPay ‘Assurance Payload’: Google will need to replace device data with transaction risk signals and account risk signals to accommodate merchant risk engines (a version of Google SPA is also possible). For example, today, within the GPay transaction response, merchants can request an assuranceDetails object. This object contains crucial fields: accountVerified (indicating that cardholder possession has been validated by Google/GPay) and cardHolderAuthenticated (signifying that identification and verification (ID&V) of the user has been performed). This payload effectively provides an alternative risk assessment signal, particularly valuable when traditional device data is absent or unreliable.
- Secure Payment Confirmation (SPC): Leveraging FIDO standards, SPC enables transaction details (such as merchant ID and transaction amount) to be cryptographically signed by the user’s FIDO authenticator. This process generates strong, non-repudiable evidence of the user’s explicit consent to the specific transaction parameters, an assurance that is independent of traditional device signals. Google Pay can integrate SPC to provide merchants with a very high degree of confidence in the legitimacy of agent-initiated transactions. The FIDO assertion, containing these signed details, essentially becomes the new “proof of interaction” and consent, which is vital in agentic scenarios where the agent might be acting on pre-authorized instructions from the user.
- GPay’s Inherent Security Features: Beyond these newer mechanisms, GPay incorporates established security measures like end-to-end encryption, tokenization (DPANs replacing actual card numbers), and Google’s own sophisticated AI-driven fraud detection systems that monitor for suspicious activity.
- Tokenized DPANS provisioned to Google Wallet
- Gateway? Google’s pilot effort to be a gateway and own the transaction risk.
- Card and Non Card (ie PIX and UPI)
Wrap Up
This approach has the potential to redefine not only product discovery and payment processes but also the very nature of how users with merchants to conduct commerce. By making GPay indispensable for agentic transactions, Google aims to significantly boost its adoption among merchants, driven by the prospect of defined demand with higher conversion rates and access to sales initiated by Google’s AI across its vast ecosystem. All of which is measurable against other ad campaigns and organic demand within Google Analytics.
Google has the agentic strategy and infrastructure, ad network, merchant relationships, consumer data, consumer behavior, devices/surfaces, seach, authentication the newest item in the mix is GPay payments. err.. that’s 14 years old.
Big congrats to Google on all the work behind these announcements. AI start ups.. recommend you focus your efforts on working with merchants to improve CX. Its going to be hard to compete against Google’s assets.