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After securing a partnership with Samsung in early 2024 for integration of Gemini Pro and Imagen 2, Google crossed another milestone on Sunday. This time, Google’s partner is none other than the largest retail chain Walmart (Nasdaq: WMT).

At the National Retail Federation’s Big Show (NRF ’26), ending on Tuesday, both Google CEO Sundar Pichai and incoming Walmart CEO John Furner announced Gemini’s integration to discover products at Walmart. This includes Sam’s Club, the company’s response to Costco’s warehouse business model.

“The transition from traditional web or app search to agent-led commerce represents the next great evolution in retail. We aren’t just watching the shift, we are driving it.”

John Furner, incoming Walmart CEO (as of February 1st)

The question is, what are the broader implications of this partnership?

The Protocolization of Commerce

Gemini’s integration is not that surprising. Mid-October 2025, Walmart partnered with OpenAI to enable “AI-first shopping”, making it possible to complete purchases within ChatGPT through Instant Checkout.

This time, Walmart leverages Google’s latest Universal Commerce Protocol (UCP), launched on Sunday. Fitting into the existing agentic frameworks – Agent2Agent (A2A), Agent Payments Protocol (AP2) and Model Context Protocol (MCP) – UCP standardizes Alphabet’s agentic commerce from discovery and buying to post-purchase support through Google Pay or PayPal.

Whether shopping is done on Shopify, Etsy or Walmart, UCP makes it possible to have AI agents check availability, pricing and product details seamlessly.

In practice, this means Gemini will auto-include Walmart and Sam’s Club products whenever it is relevant to users’ query. In other words, just as people are increasingly discovering internet content via Google’s AI Overview, product discovery is now being abstracted away from traditional search and marketplaces.

This is a natural evolution of the AI era. Given the interactive nature of chat bots, and their more granular focus on users’ needs, commerce is shifting from searching to being suggested. Likewise, instead of relying on visibility through SEO or ad expenditure, companies are now relying on protocol-level inclusion.

For Walmart, this means further entrenchment as a consumer staple. For Alphabet/Google, this means extension from information discovery into transaction orchestration. In addition to regulating what users see, which we previously dubbed Control-as-a-Service (CaaS), Google is becoming intent fulfiller.

Speaking of fulfilling intent, Walmart and Alphabet are also moving to compete with Amazon in the logistics arena.

Drone Delivery Expands, but Progress Isn’t Linear

Also on Sunday, Walmart and Alphabet announced an expansion of Wing’s drone delivery service to 150 more stores, bringing total coverage of 270 Walmart stores after the expansion. As with other automated delivery services like Serve Robotics (Nasdaq: SERV), the coverage is mainly focused on metropolitan areas with high population density, such as Houston, Orlando, Tampa, Los Angeles, St. Louis, Cincinnati and Miami.

Wing is Alphabet’s drone delivery subsidiary, gaining funding from the company’s “Other Bets” segment. The Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) granted Wing a Part 135 certification in 2019, first of its kind for Package Delivery by Drone.

Unlike ground-based Serve, Wing has to worry less about interception within high urban crime environments, owing to drones’ dual-propulsion fixed-wing design that is capable of carrying up to 5 pounds (2.3kg) within 6 miles (9.6km).

Wing’s drone capability is similar to Amazon’s Prime Air service, using MK30 drones, mainly limited to parts of Texas and Michigan. After a two-month suspension of Prime Air in early 2025, Amazon continued coverage expansion, with the latest being in Darlington, Northeast England.

However, linear progress should not be expected everywhere, as evidenced by Amazon’s permanent cancellation of Prime Air in Italy, in late 2025. Initially, Amazon set a goal of global 500 million drone deliveries annually by 2030, which is now highly unlikely as it lags behind Wing.

The Bottom Line

Google search has been consistently maintaining 90% global market share. Equally so, Google’s Android has the dominant 71% mobile OS market share, with only Apple’s iOS in the game at 28%.

The Gemini AI model is Alphabet’s latest domination of defaults with 1.5 billion monthly AI Overview interactions and 650 million monthly active app users, as of Q3 2025 earnings call.

As Gemini processed 7 billion tokens per minute in that quarter, Alphabet/Google has increasingly deeper traction into user intent, behavior and transactional readiness across the consumer stack. Consequently, the latest Walmart partnership is a logical extension of Google’s control over defaults.

It is then no surprise that Alphabet (GOOGL) recently joined Nvidia as a $4 trillion company. According to the Wall Street Journal’s consensus, the average GOOGL price target is now $342.13, still above the current price of $327.22 per share. With a similar wide moat, Walmart (WMT) stock’s average price target is $124.35 against its current price of $118.55 per share.

That said, with expectations already elevated and moats well recognized, the risk-reward profile suggests timing discipline matters more with stock market corrections inevitably ahead.

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