Google is set to host Google Marketing Live 2026 on May 20, with keynote sessions from Vidhya Srinivasan and Philipp Schindler, as the tech giant deepens its push into AI-driven advertising and commerce.
The event will take place alongside Google I/O 2026, which runs from May 19 to 20, underscoring the company’s efforts to align its developer and advertising ecosystems around AI-powered products and services.
Google is expected to unveil new AI-powered campaign tools, agentic commerce capabilities within Search and Shopping, an expanded YouTube performance suite, and what it describes as “new opportunities to create, capture, and convert demand across the expanding Google universe.”
Industry observers say the announcements could signal a major evolution for Google’s advertising products, particularly around AI-assisted automation and monetisation within Search experiences such as AI Overviews.
The developments come amid intensifying competition in the AI advertising space. Microsoft recently introduced AI Max for Search, featuring expanded query matching and personalised ads across Copilot and Bing. The company described its strategy as “winning across all three eras of the web.”
Meanwhile, OpenAI has launched cost-per-click advertising inside ChatGPT and is reportedly forecasting $2.5 billion in ad revenue by 2026. The Trade Desk has rolled out Koa Agents with Stagwell as a pilot partner, while Adobe has replaced Experience Cloud with CX Enterprise and introduced persistent AI agents called “Coworkers.”
“The pattern is clear: every major ad platform is converting AI from a feature into infrastructure,” the original analysis noted.
“For PPC teams, the practical question for May is no longer ‘should we test Performance Max?’ — it’s ‘how do we keep human judgment in the loop when the platforms increasingly want to take it out?’” it added
