Google announced expanded AI capabilities for ads and ecommerce today at its Google Marketing Live event.

The new features include enhanced Smart Bidding Exploration, Google’s biggest update to bidding in the past decade. It builds on existing Smart Bidding with a new opt-in feature in search campaigns that use AI and flexible Return on Ad Spend (ROAS) targets to capture new searches and additional conversions. Google says it sees more than five trillion searches on the platform each year, and now with AI, the types of questions that people can ask continue to expand.

The Ads in AI Overviews feature has been expanded to desktop in the U.S. Later this year, it will roll out in English to select countries across mobile and desktop, including Canada.

According to Google, AI Overviews is one of its most successful launches in Search in 10 years. It is driving a more than 10% increase in use of Google for searches that show AI Overviews in the U.S. and India. The feature enables users to quickly connect with relevant businesses, products and services. An ad test is now underway for Ad placements below and integrated into the AI Mode response, based on learnings in AI Overviews.

When it comes to ad creation, Google introduced AI-powered creative tools driven by Veo and Imagen that have been designed for building campaigns. The tools will soon be found in the Google Ads and Merchant Center.

Also new is a creative suite called the Asset Studio now available in Google Ads. The Studio pulls together the tools for creating impactful visuals into one location. For merchants using Google’s Product Studio, the new Generated for You feature automatically identifies the best content across a brand’s catalogs and pre-generates images and videos that advertisers can then use on Google.

Agentic AI capabilities are being deployed across Google Ads and Google Analytics to help advertisers set up campaigns. These tools help with onboarding, campaign creation, reporting and troubleshooting. In Google Ads, the agentic expert will offer advertisers personalized ad recommendations such as keyword and creative suggestions. In Google Analytics, the data expert provides insights, trends and enables easy data exploration to assist in troubleshooting campaign issues.

Marketers will also be able to install Marketing Advisor, an AI agent inside the Chrome browser that’s been designed to help advertisers manage marketing tasks. It will do more than answer specific questions via text or voice. The Advisor helps advertisers run assessments and identify strategies across their business. Marketing Advisor will begin rolling out later this year.