Choose What's for Dinner in ChatGPT, Fill a Safeway Cart
Albertsons is expanding its partnership with OpenAI, putting AI to work for both employees and grocery shoppers. You find ingredients and deals in ChatGPT, then head to Safeway to check out.
OpenAI announced on October 1 (US time) that it is expanding its partnership with Albertsons Cos., the American grocery retailer. Employees are using the business version, ChatGPT Enterprise, for their work, while customers get a new shopping feature that finds Safeway products and builds a cart inside ChatGPT. It is designed to help from the moment you start wondering what to make for dinner through to picking out the ingredients.
Albertsons operates more than 2,200 stores, including Safeway and Vons. More than 36 million people shop at the company’s stores each week. OpenAI said the partnership focuses on speeding up employees’ work and making grocery shopping easier for customers.
Just say what’s for dinner, and the cart fills itself
The Safeway shopping feature can start from a recipe, a photo, or a digital shopping list. You can ask it to put together a pizza dinner for four, or to assemble a quick dinner from prepared foods. You can also ask it to stock up on breakfast items and snacks using store-brand products. Instead of typing out product names one by one, you start shopping by describing a meal plan.
Image: OpenAI
ChatGPT surfaces products and deals that match the request and assembles the cart. For checkout, customers are directed to Safeway to complete the purchase there. Jill Pavlovich, senior vice president of digital customer experience at Albertsons, presented the feature as an example of using AI to take the friction out of everyday shopping.
The feature extends the AI shopping assistant and Ask AI capabilities Albertsons was already using. After Safeway, the company plans to expand to its other grocery brands, including Albertsons, Vons, Jewel-Osco, Shaw’s, ACME and Tom Thumb. It is also exploring ways to build meal plans based on preferences customers share, and to help shoppers re-add items they buy regularly.
How employees will use it
The company is also extending AI to internal work that customers never see. The teams that build its retail technology, along with some business units, are using ChatGPT Enterprise and apps built on OpenAI. A handful of teams are going first, testing ways to streamline workflows and support decision-making. The company intends to pick the use cases that prove out and turn them into ways of working across the whole organization.
Image: OpenAI
For product recommendations and promotion decisions, Albertsons combines predictive models with generative AI. OpenAI said this lets merchandisers understand why a recommendation was made and weigh the business considerations alongside it. For personalization, recommendations and promotion analysis, the company uses the OpenAI API, the route developers take to build AI into their own services.
For customers, the change is being able to name a dish and find the products. For employees, it is reviewing recommendations and promotion data side by side. What to watch next is how far the shopping feature spreads from Safeway to the other brands, and whether the practices piloted by a few teams carry over to the organization as a whole.