Google has just taken a major leap in e-commerce: its revamped AI Mode can now call local stores on your behalf and even purchase products when conditions are right. The tech giant introduced this ground-breaking suite of shopping tools just ahead of the 2025 holiday season, blending its Gemini AI, Shopping Graph, and Duplex calling technology into a powerful personal shopping assistant.
Here’s how it works: when you’re searching for something “near me” in Google Search’s AI Mode, you’ll sometimes get a new option labeled “Let Google Call.” After choosing it, the AI asks a few clarifying questions — what you’re looking for, your preferred brand or model, and how much you want to spend. Google’s Duplex-powered bot then dials nearby stores to check stock, pricing, and even ongoing promotions.
The AI doesn’t hide what it is: during the call, it clearly identifies itself as a bot so that the store knows it’s not a human customer. After gathering the information, the AI agent sends you a summary — via text or email — along with local inventory insights pulled from Google’s vast Shopping Graph, which holds over 50 billion product listings and updates around 2 billion of them every hour.
But Google doesn’t stop at checking stock. The company has also introduced agentic checkout, allowing you to set a target price for an item. Once that item drops to your set price and the retailer supports the feature, Google will give you a prompt: “Buy for me.” If you confirm, the AI completes the purchase using Google Pay, handling both checkout and shipping details. For now, this capability is limited to U.S. customers and works with a defined list of merchants — including Wayfair, Chewy, Quince, and select Shopify sellers.
Google sees these changes as a way to eliminate the annoying parts of shopping — those tedious tasks like calling multiple stores, checking inventory, or watching prices — while preserving the joy of browsing. As Vidhya Srinivasan, Google’s VP and GM of Ads and Commerce, explained, the goal is to retain the fun, serendipitous discovery of shopping while automating the drudge work.
These new tools aren’t just limited to Google Search. Google is also bringing them into the Gemini app, so you can converse with the AI in a chat interface, ask it for gift ideas, filter by budget, and browse visually. When you tell Gemini what you want (“comfortable hiking boots under $120,” for example), it uses the same Shopping Graph to pull up personalized options — along with comparison tables, price history, and product reviews.
Behind all these features lies Google’s impressive technological backbone. The Shopping Graph — the huge catalog of listings — is combined with Google’s Duplex calling system and advanced Gemini AI models. This lets Google not only place calls intelligently, but also ask relevant follow-up questions and then compress the conversations into meaningful summaries.
Google is being thoughtful about how stores experience these calls. Merchants can choose to opt out of being contacted by these AI agents. For businesses that do participate, the AI ensures transparency — it announces it’s a bot, asks necessary questions, and doesn’t abuse the privilege.
The timing couldn’t have been better: rolling out just before the holidays, these features are clearly aimed at helping shoppers save time and money when shopping is at its most frenzied. And from a business perspective, Google is offering a new way to drive traffic: its agentic wrapper could help local stores turn foot traffic into real sales, provided they participate.
That said, the rollout is currently US-only, and Google hasn’t announced a global expansion yet.
But if widely adopted, this shift could fundamentally change how consumers interact with brands and how retailers manage inventory — turning AI from a passive helper into an active commerce partner.
