Nick Fox, Google's senior vice president of Knowledge and Information, sat down with tipsheet.ai on May 20, 2026 - the same day as Google Marketing Live - to walk through the company's current thinking on AI search, commerce infrastructure, and the future of advertising. The interview, published by John Ebbert on tipsheet.ai, covers territory that matters directly to the marketing community: what the division between Search and the Gemini app actually looks like, where Direct Offers and the Universal Cart fit within the advertising stack, and how campaign types like AI Max, Performance Max and Demand Gen are meant to interlock as Gemini takes on more of the execution layer.

Fox has led Google's knowledge and information division since October 2024, when Google reorganised its AI and search teams and moved Prabhakar Raghavan to a chief technologist role. The division covers search, maps, commerce and ads - a perimeter wide enough that Fox's comments on any single product tend to carry implications across the others.

Google I/O and Marketing Live: two stages, one message

The week of May 19, 2026 produced an unusual volume of announcements across two consecutive events. Google I/O on May 19 concentrated on consumer-facing product changes: an upgraded search box that accepts text, images, files, video and Chrome tabs from a single entry point; Gemini 3.5 Flash powering AI Mode; and what Google described as "information agents" - search processes that run in the background and alert users when a tracked condition is met. Google Marketing Live followed on May 20, directing the same AI narrative at advertisers.

According to tipsheet.ai, Fox identified the Gemini integration across Google's products as his headline from the week. "I'd say both today, as well as yesterday at Google I/O, the big thing is how Gemini is supercharging so many parts of Google's products and business," Fox told tipsheet. He cited the upgraded search box as reflecting a meaningful product shift. "The evolution of Search from a product that has AI features in it to being AI search through-and-through is a big moment. The search box reflects that shift," he said.

The advertiser-facing portion of that shift included new ad formats for AI Mode, updates to Demand Gen for YouTube, and tools for campaign creation and creative generation through Asset Studio.

Search versus the Gemini app: separate north stars, overlapping territory

One of the more technically specific parts of the interview concerned the long-term relationship between Google Search and the Gemini app. Both products are expanding, and both now handle informational queries, purchase journeys and conversational interaction. Fox acknowledged the overlap but framed the two as having different organising principles.

"Search, as you mentioned, is evolving from search to AI search. What's unique about our approach is that it's not AI or search, it's not AI or the web, but really it's bringing those together. We are deeply committed to the web, and our view is that the web - and the connection to the web - is what makes a search engine so powerful," he told tipsheet.

The Gemini app, in Fox's framing, operates on a different axis. "The Gemini app is your assistant - it's with you as you go about your day, and it's helping you get things done. We talk about it as being personal, proactive, and powerful, but that's really pushing forward on the system that's helping you get things done as you go about your day," he said.

There is, Fox conceded, a Venn diagram of overlap between the two products - and Google is deliberately accepting it. A user asking an informational question inside the Gemini app will get an answer. A user trying to complete a purchase inside Search will get assistance. The two products will not refuse to handle requests that nominally belong to the other. That design choice complicates the clean segmentation that campaign planners often use to allocate budget across surfaces.

PPC Land's recap of Google I/O 2026 noted that VP of Search Liz Reid stated "Search is AI Search now" at the event, reinforcing the same positioning Fox articulated in the tipsheet interview.

Personal Intelligence and information agents: search going deeper

Fox expanded on a feature Google announced earlier in 2026 called Personal Intelligence, which allows users who opt in to connect Gmail, Calendar and Photos to their search experience. The integration pulls contextual signals from those services directly into search results, reducing the need for users to navigate between applications.

"Being able to pull that directly into Search is actually really useful," he told tipsheet. The example he cited - a search that could be improved by something in a user's Gmail without requiring the user to leave Search and open Gmail - reflects the broader product direction: reducing friction between Google's existing surfaces by treating them as components of a single unified layer rather than separate applications.

Information agents, announced at Google I/O, extend this approach. According to tipsheet, Fox described them as "having search do the searching for you, behind the scenes, 24/7." The example given was product availability - an agent monitors conditions and alerts the user the moment something changes, providing context and links to deeper reading at the same time. These agents operate at the monitoring and alerting layer rather than the transactional layer, distinguishing them from the agentic booking features Google has been expanding since late 2025.

The Universal Cart and agentic commerce infrastructure

The Universal Cart, announced on May 19 at Google I/O, is a single cross-merchant shopping cart that spans Search, the Gemini app, Gmail and YouTube. It operates on top of the Universal Commerce Protocol (UCP), the open standard Google launched on January 11, 2026, at the National Retail Federation conference, co-developed with Shopify, Etsy, Wayfair, Target and Walmart.

PPC Land's coverage of the Universal Cart announcement noted that Google processes more than a billion shopping interactions per day, running on the Shopping Graph, which the company describes as the world's most comprehensive product catalog with over 60 billion product listings. The UCP launched with REST and JSON-RPC transport layers and defined four participant roles: Platforms, Businesses, Credential Providers, and Payment Service Providers.

Fox told tipsheet that the cart addresses a specific friction point in the current shopping journey. "Once the user finds what they're looking for, it can be a burden to check out. They may be on a site that they haven't used before and they're giving your payment information, their address, all this kind of stuff for the first time. All of this leads to a burden for the user. And oftentimes, users abandon at that point. Abandoned carts are a big thing - that's lost opportunity for users and businesses," he said.

The UCP and Universal Cart are designed to resolve that abandonment by standardising the checkout layer across participating merchants. Rather than requiring custom integrations for each retailer-platform combination, UCP creates a common interface that AI agents can use to access product catalogs, pricing, inventory and checkout. As PPC Land has tracked, only 26 sites had implemented UCP as of late May 2026, despite four months of headline activity around the protocol. The Universal Cart's arrival as a consumer-facing layer may push further merchant adoption.

Google expanded UCP to hotels, food delivery and three new countries - Canada, Australia and the United Kingdom - at GML 2026, while also integrating Affirm and Klarna as payment options. Running alongside UCP is the Agent Payments Protocol (AP2), which provides cryptographic authorisation for agents to execute purchases within parameters set by the user.

When asked whether the Universal Cart represents an opportunity for advertising integration, Fox declined to confirm plans. "We'll see. We haven't announced anything along those lines at this point. Merchandising at the cart stage is, for sure, interesting for retailers, but exactly how that evolves is TBD," he told tipsheet.

Agentic commerce: a definition with limits

Fox offered a specific definition of how Google views agentic commerce - one that places limits on the degree of autonomous decision-making the company expects to see in practice, at least in the near term.

"I expect that for the majority of the things that we buy as humans, we will continue to be in the loop. I think people actually like shopping. People like picking out their clothes, a car or a hotel because it's a reflection of who we are and how we want to show up," he told tipsheet.

His distinction is between commodity items - where full agent execution may eventually make sense - and higher-value or identity-linked purchases, where human involvement is expected to remain standard. "A world in which you're handing off all the decision-making in terms of taste and choice and all of that - it might exist for commodity items like paper towels but for the bulk of the things, or at least for the high-value things we're buying, a human will still be heavily involved in that decision making," he said.

This framing has practical consequences for how marketers should think about the agentic commerce buildout. Google's infrastructure is not aimed at removing the consumer from the purchase decision - it is aimed at removing friction from the discovery and checkout steps that surround that decision. The query layer is becoming richer and more conversational; the checkout layer is becoming more standardised and persistent. The decision itself, Fox argues, stays human.

Direct Offers: merchandising or advertising?

Direct Offers, which Fox described as having originated in January 2026, sits at an intersection that does not map cleanly onto existing advertising or merchandising categories. The format surfaces targeted discounts within AI Mode when a user signals purchase intent, labeled as "Sponsored deal" in the interface.

Fox traced the logic behind it. "People like saving money - and the insight was, as users provide longer and more specific questions, what's the right way for a retailer or merchant to reach that user? The thought we had was if you're able to bring together specific highly targeted offers for the moment where the users are looking to buy, it could be highly valuable for the user and for the merchant to win that purchase, that transaction," he told tipsheet.

He also signalled that Direct Offers reflects a deliberate rethink of what advertising in AI-native environments should look like, rather than a port of existing ad products. "More broadly, as we approach modernisation of these new experiences, we're not just taking an existing ad product and bolting it on by saying what worked before will work here. Instead we're using it as an opportunity to rethink these experiences from a user, retailer and marketer point of view," he said.

PPC Land's coverage of the January 2026 UCP launch documented that Direct Offers appeared as a new format allowing retailers to surface exclusive discounts within AI Mode, labeled as "Sponsored deal." The format's position within the interface - inside an AI-generated conversational response rather than in a traditional ad slot - raises the same trust and disclosure questions Fox addressed directly in the interview.

On trust, he offered a clear statement of principle. "Trust is the foundation of everything we do. It's the foundation of how we've approached search and approached advertising in our search experiences as well. We are operating with a set of core principles starting with ads that are always clearly marked and clearly separated," he told tipsheet.

Asset Studio, creative loops and the DCO comparison

On the creative side, Fox addressed Asset Studio - the centralised creative production environment within Google Ads that received updates at GML 2026, including Gemini Omni multimodal video creation and a natural language interface for generating and refining assets from a brief.

Asset Studio's GML 2026 updates also included 1-Click Creative Testing, which PPC Land noted allows a direct A/B structure between two sets of creatives with quantitative measurement of the performance difference. According to Google's internal data cited at the announcement, Gemini reduces irrelevant ads by 40%, based on internal data from 2024 to 2025. Advertising creative drives nearly 49% of incremental sales, according to NCSolutions data published alongside the announcement.

Fox placed Asset Studio within the history of dynamic creative optimisation (DCO), framing it as a continuation of that direction rather than a departure from it. "I think it's reasonable to view it as an extension of dynamic creatives, but taken to a whole other level," he told tipsheet. The feedback loops embedded in Google's ad systems - predicting click and conversion rates, feeding that signal back into creative selection - are what Fox described as moving to "the next level" through AI generation.

Asked directly whether Google thinks about creative generation within a closed-loop system, Fox confirmed it. "The feedback loop is important. One of the hallmarks of Google's ads approach is showing ads that are more likely to perform well for users and advertisers and understanding likely click and conversion rates. So, those feedback loops are a core part of how it works and all of that goes to the 'next level' through this moment that we're in," he said.

AI Max, Performance Max and Demand Gen: the division of labour

The interview closed with a detailed exchange on how AI Max, Performance Max and Demand Gen relate to each other as the campaign type landscape consolidates. Google retired Dynamic Search Ads in September 2026, automatically migrating them to AI Max - a decision that foreshadowed the direction Fox outlined.

According to tipsheet, Fox described AI Max as focused specifically on AI-native experiences within Search. "AI Max, in particular, [is focused on] AI experiences in Search. For example, the new ad formats that we announced today are available within AI Max and Performance Max. It's not a full reinvention of the campaign structure and campaign type, but it's an easy way for marketers to tap into this AI opportunity within Search," he said.

Demand Gen carries the same Gemini-powered improvements but is directed at YouTube and non-search surfaces. Both campaign types are receiving AI improvements rather than being merged. Google's Demand Gen updates at GML 2026included Google Maps as a new ad inventory surface, product feed expansion to automotive, AI-assisted campaign creation that copies settings and assets from an existing Performance Max campaign, and checkout links in nine new markets.

Fox declined to commit to merging the three campaign types. "We'll see how it evolves. We'll listen to the market for a view back on it," he told tipsheet. That non-answer is itself informative - it leaves open a consolidation path that several in the industry have anticipated, while making no commitment to a timeline.

On the broader question of automation, Fox was explicit about the goal. "What we're trying to do is enable marketers to reach users at the moment that they're most relevant to them with the least amount of work possible on the marketer's end," he said.

The marketer's role

The interview touched on what the combination of AI-generated creative, automated targeting and agentic campaign execution means for the people running campaigns. Fox did not predict a reduction in the marketing function - he predicted a shift in its character.

"I'm a big believer in people. Even as AI becomes more helpful, more useful, what we're doing is equipping people with tools that give them superpowers. I don't think the marketer of the future goes away. The marketer of the future is way more effective at what they do," he told tipsheet.

In his framing, the marketer's role shifts toward setting creative direction, defining goals and configuring the boundaries within which automation operates. "What the marketer is doing is saying here's the creative direction we want to go, here's our goals - they're setting the boundary and saying, 'I want to reach these people.' And then the tools are helping them achieve that," he said.

He tied this directly to the complexity of the current query environment. "Queries are getting longer and more complex. There are follow-up queries. It's impossible to reach users in all those moments without automation and AI-powered tools to help," he said.

AI Mode searches are, on average, three times as long as traditional searches, and 1 in 6 queries are non-text, using voice or images. Those figures come from Google's own data cited at GML 2026. By Google I/O, monthly AI Mode users had passed 1 billion - up from 75 million daily active users in February 2026, when Google first formally announced shopping ads for the surface.

Why this interview matters for the marketing community

The tipsheet conversation with Fox is notable for providing executive-level framing on a set of product decisions that most marketers are currently navigating without clear structural guidance. The GML 2026 full recap on PPC Land noted that the event's central message was Google asking advertisers to hand more of the campaign execution layer to Gemini. Fox's interview provides the rationale behind that ask - and the limits of it.

Three tensions are worth watching. First, the overlap between Search and the Gemini app creates ambiguity for budget allocation and attribution, and Google is not moving to resolve it in the short term. Second, the Universal Cart and UCP represent a shift in who controls the interface layer of shopping - away from merchant-controlled checkout pages and toward Google-controlled persistence. Third, the distinction between Direct Offers as merchandising versus advertising remains genuinely unresolved, with Fox explicitly describing the format as a rethink rather than an extension of existing ad products.

Each of these carries implications that will take months to show up in campaign data. The interview at least establishes what Google's own leadership believes is happening - and what it has chosen, for now, not to commit to.

Timeline

Summary

Who: Nick Fox, Google's SVP of Knowledge and Information, in an interview with John Ebbert, founder and managing editor of tipsheet.ai. Fox has led the division - covering search, maps, commerce and ads - since October 2024.

What: A detailed interview covering Google's strategic framing on AI search, the distinction between Search and the Gemini app, the Universal Cart and Universal Commerce Protocol, Direct Offers, Asset Studio, and the division of labour between AI Max, Performance Max and Demand Gen. The interview was published on May 21, 2026, drawing on a conversation conducted on May 20, the same day as Google Marketing Live.

When: The interview was published on May 21, 2026, the day after Google Marketing Live 2026, which itself followed Google I/O 2026 on May 19. The week produced the highest volume of Google advertising product announcements in 2026 to date.

Where: The interview was published on tipsheet.ai, an online publication founded by John Ebbert covering the AI opportunity in advertising and marketing. Ebbert previously founded AdExchanger in 2008, which was acquired by Access Intelligence in 2017. Google Marketing Live was livestreamed from Google's Bay View campus in Mountain View, California, to more than 100 countries.

Why: The interview provides executive-level framing at a moment when Google's advertising stack is undergoing structural change - new campaign types, new ad formats inside conversational interfaces, new commerce infrastructure, and a fundamental shift in where the boundary sits between what marketers control and what Gemini controls. The marketing community is operating with limited structural guidance on these questions; Fox's remarks at least establish what Google's leadership believes is happening, and what it has chosen not to commit to.

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