Imagine a world in which artificial intelligence predicts what we are cooking for dinner and what groceries we need to buy, then executes that order, then delivers them. This Jetsons version of grocery shopping is already in the making thanks to a newly minted collaboration between Walmart and OpenAI.
It’s called agentic commerce, where AI bots don’t just answer questions but predict what customers will want – turning the shopping experience into a conversation, and the retailer from being reactive to proactive.
This is how the technology would work in theory: Coles or Woolworths knows it is pizza night at your place on Tuesday and buys the ingredients, debits your card and delivers the purchase to your home. What if you forgot to buy the bread and milk, only to find it on the doorstep? Well, agentic commerce promises to do just that.
The chatbot currently helping us compile a report for work could soon be curating our shopping list. Credit: Bloomberg
While you could write this off as another digital gimmick, a retailer the size of Walmart diving headlong into AI will make the likes of Coles, Woolworths and Aldi pay attention. If Walmart’s investment pays off it could fundamentally change the way we shop.
So the chatbot that’s currently helping us compile a report for work could soon be curating our shopping list. It’s a futurist fantasy inserting itself into our lives – whether that’s utopian or dystopian, you pick.
The case for Walmart investing big in the AI shopping experience is driven in part by its need to play catch-up with retail disruptor competitor Amazon, and a desire to satisfy millennial customers seeking a more immersive digital shopping experience.
And there’s a good chance the services Walmart is looking to develop will hit Australian shores sooner rather than later. There is already plenty of AI powering the back end of Australia’s large supermarkets, particularly in ordering and logistics.
And our supermarkets already have a quite intimate relationship with their customers, courtesy of their loyalty schemes. Moreover, the sophistication of our payments system is a clear enabler of this next step in online shopping.
Australian consumers have traditionally been early adopters of new technologies, and this is one occasion where our supermarket duopoly can actually be a good thing. Both Coles and Woolworths have the dollars to invest in agentic commerce and all it will take is for one to take the plunge and the other will follow.