Alphabet stock. Buy, Sell or Hold?

In a January 12 report, Roth Capital Markets analyst Rohit Kulkarni maintained a “Buy” rating and a 12-month price target of US$310.00 on Alphabet (Alphabet Stock Quote, Chart, News, Analysts, Financials NYSE:GOOGL), arguing the company is disrupting retail search from within rather than facing an innovator’s dilemma.

Kulkarni said Google’s launch of the Universal Commerce Protocol, alongside partners including Shopify, Walmart and Etsy, marks a structural shift from a “search-click-buy” model to “chat-then-buy.” He said Google emphasized that AI expands total retail demand by improving discovery and conversion, rather than simply redistributing market share, while positioning itself as commerce infrastructure instead of a direct retailer.

“We see Google’s announcements as significant for OpenAI and Amazon, and now we await next developments in agentic commerce in 2026,” Kulkarni said.

Google framed AI as the most important platform shift in two decades, committing to a full-stack approach that spans custom chips, cloud infrastructure, frontier models and consumer products. Kulkarni highlighted Google’s nearly five-million miles of terrestrial and subsea fibre, eighth-generation TPUs and roughly 10× performance gains in recent AI hardware generations as durable advantages.

On adoption, Google disclosed that retail customers processed 8.3-trillion tokens through its APIs in December 2024, rising to more than 90-trillion tokens one year later. AI-powered Search now serves more than 200-million monthly users, the Gemini app has over 650-million monthly users, and Gemini Enterprise surpassed two-million business users within months of launch.

Kulkarni said product discovery is shifting away from keyword searches toward natural-language conversations. Google’s Shopping Graph now includes more than 50-billion product listings, with over two-billion refreshed monthly, while AI Search, Gemini, visual search and YouTube are increasingly integrated into the shopping journey.

He described UCP as an open, agent-compatible standard that enables personalized offers, loyalty integration and checkout directly within AI conversations. Built with more than 20 global partners, UCP supports merchant-controlled relationships and is compatible with existing agent protocols.

Kulkarni said AI agents are expected to guide consumers from discovery through checkout without leaving the conversation.

“Google plans to introduce buy buttons inside AI Search and Gemini,” he said, adding that agents can personalize pricing, surface loyalty benefits, recommend add-on products and complete transactions in real time.

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