Personal shoppers: they’re not just for the rich and famous anymore.
What happened: Google has expanded its online shopping integration for Gemini to Canada, offering direct checkout for purchases made from Lululemon, Shoppers Drug Mart, Simons, and select Shopify merchants without ever having to leave the chatbot. Consumers can also ask Gemini to research and select an item for them to buy and add it to their cart.
Gemini doesn’t have the autonomy to make the purchase, with the final decision to buy resting with the user. Google plans to add more eligible retailers next year.
Why it matters: As AI eats away at other parts of traditional search, Google is looking to shore up shopping searches with AI. It could be a winning play: a Mastercard survey found that 41% of Canadians are open to using AI for online shopping, with more than half of those AI-curious respondents also open to the idea of letting AI agents make purchases for them.
Shopify is one company that’s seen early results from agentic shopping. Though it still makes up a tiny fraction of sales on the platform, the company says the number of orders merchants made as a direct result of AI was 3.3 times larger than last year.
Yes, but: There are signs that people aren’t exactly champing at the bit to delegate all of their shopping duties to bots. DoorDash said that it only had “several hundred” orders placed by third-party AI agents so far — for context, it averaged 3 million deliveries a day in 2025. Meanwhile, Uber fulfilled just four trips ordered by agents last quarter. Seriously! That’s all!
Our take: AI agents might one day account for a meaningful share of purchases made. But here’s the thing: many people enjoy shopping and won’t want to offload it to AI like they do with boring stuff like spreadsheets.—QH
