Google announced its latest product advancements in advertising and commerce at Google Marketing Live 2025.
Google Marketing Live is an annual event that showcases new product innovations for advertising and commerce platforms, focusing on AI’s influence on consumer behavior and business opportunities.
These advancements highlight how AI is transforming advertising and digital commerce, providing tools designed to help businesses connect with their customers more effectively.
“In Sub-Saharan Africa, the digital landscape is experiencing explosive growth, making digital presence and AI adoption no longer an option but a necessity for businesses to thrive and connect with their customers effectively,” said Kabelo Makwane, Google Country Director for South Africa. “These GML announcements reinforce our commitment to equipping South Africa’s vibrant business community with cutting-edge AI tools to unlock new opportunities and achieve their growth ambitions.”
Key innovations introduced at GML 2025 include
Ads in AI Overviews and New AI Mode Ads AI Overviews, which provide AI-generated summaries at the top of Google Search results, have proven to be one of the most successful launches in Search in the past decade. Google sees more than 5 trillion searches annually.
In major markets like the U.S. and India, AI Overviews are driving over a 10% increase in Google usage for the types of queries that show them. People who interact with AI Overviews search more often and are happier with the results, with the volume of commercial queries also increasing.
Initially, Search and Shopping ads in AI Overviews will be expanding to desktop in the U.S. starting today, May 21, 2025. Later in 2025, ads in AI Overviews will expand in English to select countries on mobile and desktop, including Canada, Australia, the Philippines, South Africa, Pakistan, Nigeria, India, Malaysia, Singapore, Kenya, and Indonesia.
This expansion, along with tests for ads within AI Mode—a more conversational AI search experience for complex questions—is intended to offer businesses more opportunities for consumer connection. Where relevant, ads may appear below and integrated into AI Mode responses
Google is launching advanced “agentic capabilities” across its advertising platforms, offering AI assistants that can simplify tasks and provide personalized support. These new tools learn from various inputs to offer tailored guidance and assist in executing tasks, from setting up campaigns to reviewing reports.
This features a new “Marketing Advisor” in Chrome, an AI agent that provides step-by-step instruction. Coming soon to Google Ads and Google Analytics, these features will allow marketers to focus more on high-level strategy and creative innovation.
Google is introducing new features to help brands create visually compelling content more easily:
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Image-to-Video Transformation: This new generative AI feature allows users to transform still images into dynamic videos. It’s powered by Google’s latest Veo model. This capability is already available in the Merchant Center and will be coming to Google Ads in the future. This helps brands tell powerful stories and grab shoppers’ attention without needing extensive video production resources.
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AI Outpainting: This generative AI feature intelligently expands videos beyond their original frames. It’s the same technology seen behind “The Wizard of Oz” at Sphere. AI outpainting is currently available in Google Ads App campaigns and will expand to more campaign types later this year. This allows advertisers to fill all remaining aspect ratio gaps with customized, native videos.
Google is launching Asset Studio, a new workspace within Google Ads, which will centralize creative tools, offer new capabilities, and enable users to generate stunning images and showcase products in action.
New Ways for Advertisers to Measure and Understand Ads. New tools are being developed to help advertisers better analyze how their ads function. This includes making it easier to do “incrementality testing,” which helps firms determine what genuinely adds value to their marketing campaigns.
Additionally, “Data Manager” is a new central platform designed to help businesses collect, store, and use their customer information from different sources, all while keeping privacy in mind. These improvements aim to provide marketers with clearer insights and better results.
