The biggest agentic AI announcements from CES and NRF

January always starts off with a bang for marketers and brand execs getting back into office after the holidays, with both CES and the National Retail Federation (NRF) annual show held in the first two weeks of the month.

During this year’s conferences, innovations around AI were inescapable, and agentic AI in particular, which could have big implications for the ways consumers shop and brands market, got lots of attention. Marketing Brew compiled the biggest announcements below so you don’t have to ask ChatGPT.

Consumer-facing and retail AI’s big moment: Google debuted a number of shopping-focused agentic AI offerings. At NRF, the company rolled out Universal Commerce Protocol (UCP), an open standard that provides agents working on e-commerce tasks ranging from discovery to post-purchase with a common operation language. The protocol, developed with partners including Wayfair and Etsy, is built in part off of open standard MCP, and it will support a checkout option that will begin appearing on select product listings in Google’s AI Mode in Search, as well as in the Gemini app.

Google also announced Business Agent, which lets brands deploy an agent in Google Search to serve as a “virtual sales associate” to consumers, according to a Google blog post. To complement UCP, Google also announced Gemini Enterprise for Customer Experience at NRF, which lets brands deploy their own agents to support the customer journey. (Retailers like Lowe’s and Kroger have already started employing the tool.) Google Cloud also inked new and expanded retail partnerships, powered by Gemini, with Honeywell and The Home Depot.

Microsoft also trotted out its own agentic shopping offerings around NRF, including Copilot Checkout, which lets consumers purchase products in the company’s AI assistant. Checkout partners include Stripe and Shopify, while Urban Outfitters and Anthropologie are among the brands making products available to purchase. Shopify merchants can also use Microsoft’s new Brand Agents, which are designed to answer shopper product questions and engage with them conversationally.

“The retailers that thrive will be the ones that unify their business with intelligence that reaches every corner of the value chain,” Kathleen Mitford, corporate VP of global industry at Microsoft, said in a press release.

The company also released several agent templates that provide blueprints for brands to construct their own agents that will appear in Copilot. One such agent template is designed for product catalog enrichment; currently in public preview, it automates tasks like product onboarding and gleans attributes of brand products from images. Microsoft is also putting out a personalized shopping agent template for brands that provides recommendations around online or in-store experiences.

Ad tech came to play: Agentic AI is increasingly used to support ad buying, and Pubmatic showed up at CES to debut its AgenticOS platform, an operating system designed to automate programmatic buying. According to the company, the platform can be used in a “preferred LLM interface” and provides input on a campaign’s objectives and related parameters, after which the platform dispatches agents to roll the campaign out.

And CES wouldn’t be complete without Disney’s annual Global Tech & Data Showcase, during which the company touted a new internal AI-powered planning tool that uses audience agents along with client briefs and other data to construct campaigns plans. NBCUniversal, meanwhile, announced an AI tool designed to monitor live programming and contextually match ads to relevant moments. And Accenture announced this month that it invested in retail tech outfit Profitmind, whose agentic AI platform is designed to automate tasks like inventory management and pricing for retailers.

Shiny new AI toys: A number of agencies used CES to show off their own agentic AI functionalities. Omnicom rolled out a new iteration of its marketing intelligence platform Omni, which now incorporates the technology from recently acquired IPG’s Acxiom and can handle tasks like media investment optimization and creative development. Stagwell trotted out its own agentic platform, dubbed “The Machine,” which is designed to aid creative and production tasks and is compatible with tools from third-parties like Figma and Adobe.

WPP jumped on the bandwagon with its Agent Hub, a collection of “super agents” embedded in its WPP Open platform. Those include a “brand analytics” agent, which incorporates proprietary WPP data; a “behavioral science” agent that uses Ogilvy behavioral science frameworks; an “analogies” agent, which provides brand guidance based off of situations in other industries; and a “creative brain” agent that aims to provide creative inspiration.

“Our approach to AI is an open canvas, not a black box,” Elav Horwitz, WPP’s chief innovation officer, said in a press release. “WPP Open’s Agent Hub is how we harness our people’s creative energy.”