What happened
Loblaw partnered with Google to allow direct purchasing of health, beauty, and apparel products through Google Search's AI Mode and Gemini app. Loblaw is simultaneously expanding deployment of Google Cloud's Vertex AI across core operations, including supply chain and store floor management. According to Loblaw, the integration advances its strategy for agentic shopping. Google's partnership follows Loblaw's announcement last week integrating its PC Express grocery delivery app into OpenAI's ChatGPT for meal planning and ingredient purchasing.
Why it matters
Retail search is shifting from link retrieval to direct transaction within AI interfaces. By placing inventory directly inside Gemini and ChatGPT, Loblaw bypasses traditional e-commerce storefronts to capture intent at the query level. Digital product leaders and e-commerce architects face a structural change in customer acquisition: visibility now requires API-level integration with frontier models rather than traditional search engine optimisation. Following Google's recent AI Mode data integration updates, retail teams must upgrade product catalogues to support agentic purchasing or risk losing top-of-funnel traffic.
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