Google unveiled Ask Advisor at Marketing Live today, a Gemini-powered agent that sits across Google Ads, Google Analytics, Merchant Center and Google Marketing Platform and lets marketers manage campaigns, pull reports and act on recommendations without switching between products.
The pitch is unification. Google's Dan Taylor, VP of global ads, said the agents talk to each other on the back end, creating what he called a continuous thread of intelligence. A haircare brand looking for new customers could ask Ask Advisor to pull product details from Merchant Center and build a campaign in Google Ads in a single conversation.
This is not new territory for Google
The company launched separate Ads Advisor and Analytics Advisor agents last November and rolled them out to all English-language accounts. Those tools already handled campaign diagnostics, policy troubleshooting and performance reporting inside their respective products. Ask Advisor is the layer that connects them.
The difference matters. Individual product agents are useful. An agent that can move between campaign setup, measurement and inventory data starts to look like something that could replace chunks of a media buyer's daily workflow.
The control question
The tension is obvious. Every time Google makes its ad tools more autonomous, it asks marketers to hand over more operational control to the same company that sells the ad inventory. The more Ask Advisor automates, the harder it becomes for advertisers to interrogate the recommendations they are acting on.
Google says the agent learns from past interactions and tailors suggestions to individual business goals. That is a feature and a potential governance problem, depending on how much transparency advertisers demand.
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Ask Advisor is available now in beta for English-language accounts. A Merchant Center agent is coming later this year. Google also announced conversational ad formats inside AI Mode, AI-generated product bundles in its Direct Offers programme and the integration of its Meridian marketing mix model into Analytics 360.
The direction is clear. Google wants AI agents embedded in every step of the advertising workflow. Whether marketers are comfortable with that level of integration is a question Google seems confident it already knows the answer to.
