Google's AI Mode Can Now Work Like a Virtual Sales Associate

Google really wants you to use its AI to help you do your holiday shopping, and to that end, it's finally letting AI Mode and Gemini directly link you to products. The new feature is powered by Google's "Shopping Graph," a list of 50 billion products that also informs Google's Shopping tab, and it's available to everyone on both desktop and mobile starting today.

Here's how it works: In Google search's AI Mode or the Gemini app/website, you can ask a question or send a prompt about a physical product, like "Help me find an espresso maker that has a steam wand, is affordable, and is good for beginners." If the AI can find relevant product information in the Shopping Graph, it'll then give you a short writeup and pop up a few product suggestions along with shopping information, like pricing and user reviews. Clicking on any of these tiles will then open a sidebar with sites where you can purchase the item.

Credit: Michelle Ehrhardt

Essentially, it's like using Google's Shopping tab, but with a virtual shopping assistant (or, let's be real, a salesperson) you can turn to for more context about what you're seeing. Some queries will even let you click a checkbox on their product tiles so you can mark off to ask follow-up questions. For instance, you could check off two product tiles and ask the AI to compare them, or ask which is cheaper or has better reviews.

According to Google representatives at a press event, the company is hoping this will make it easier for shoppers to buy gifts for friends or relatives that are traditionally hard to shop for, and that it will make shopping easier by letting people search using natural language.

My hands-on experience

When I tested out this new tool, it generally worked out, but I did encounter a few hiccups. The biggest was that it was hard to get the AI to recognize certain products as topics it could surface tiles for. For instance, asking for "Popular Nintendo Switch games under $60" just gave me a list of games, but no links to purchase them. I assume this is because the AI thought I was simply asking for general advice about what to play instead of shopping, but no amount of rewording would prompt the tool to show me product tiles, even when I explicitly asked for them.

I also ran into problems when it came to natural language searches. At the aforementioned press event, Google gave journalists example questions to ask the AI in order to try the new feature, but I found only the questions that called out specific types of products would give me tiles to click on.

For instance, a question like "Give me Christmas gift ideas for my sister who loves knitting and reading" wouldn't trigger the new feature, but "show me ottomans that can be used as coffee tables" would. Even the example Google used in its blog announcing the feature wouldn't work for me—asking for Christmas gift ideas for a college student who likes to run gave me generic answers like "running shoes" and "moisture-wicking socks," but didn't show any specific examples that I could buy.

That shouldn't stop you from getting gift ideas from the AI, but it does mean that when you're ready to buy, you'll want to ask a fresh question that asks for a specific type of product, rather than ideas for a specific person. It's a bit of an extra step for something that's supposed to take the guesswork out of the buying process.

With those caveats in place, I still see most users still sticking to the regular shopping tab, where they can be sure they'll get product links every time. But Google's hoping that integrating shopping into AI Mode will eventually give users the best of both worlds, allowing them to make more specific searches than they could without AI, and also allowing the AI to call on training data the shopping tab doesn't have access to, like Reddit posts and website reviews.

Now I just need to find a way to convince my family that all my thoughtful gift ideas didn't just come from a robot.

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