Google is testing whether shoppers in India will complete a purchase without leaving the chatbot.
A Buy button has appeared on some Flipkart listings surfaced by Gemini and the AI Mode search experience, taking shoppers into a Flipkart-branded checkout without leaving the assistant. People familiar with the matter say the trial covers a narrow product set – phones, electronics, accessories – and only a portion of users.
A wider release is slated for October, timed to India’s festive shopping period.
The experiment goes beyond product discovery, which is where AI assistants have so far stopped. Earlier this year Google introduced the Universal Commerce Protocol, an open standard meant to let AI agents interact with retailers across the shopping journey, including checkout via a Google-hosted flow. The Flipkart test appears to differ from that demonstration, surfacing a retailer-branded checkout instead.
Google is not alone. OpenAI has been adding commerce features to its own assistants, and both companies are chasing the same logic: answer the shopping query, then capture the transaction that follows.
For Flipkart, the Walmart-owned marketplace, appearing inside Gemini is a distribution channel that does not require a shopper to open an app. For Google, it keeps purchase intent inside its own surfaces rather than handing it to a browser.
