Bring in the bots: How AI is changing the way people shop
It’s every grocery shopper’s dream: a personal assistant that plans customized meals, finds new recipes, takes stock of ingredients and places orders at the local supermarket. It may sound like a luxury reserved for a few, but this personalized service is becoming accessible to everyone thanks to artificial intelligence (AI).
While many grocers have implemented AI in back-end applications—from improving efficiencies and reducing costs to optimizing inventory—the technology is now poised to transform the customer experience.
“From a consumer perspective, the question is how can retailers solve a customer problem or challenge?” says Stewart Samuel, director of retail futures at global research firm IGD. In this regard, he says agentic AI presents a promising opportunity for grocers.
READ: Retail’s next big shift: AI-powered shopping journeys
“One of the big areas we see is automating routine shopping tasks. With agentic AI, it moves from giving information so you can make a decision to executing the decision on your behalf,” says Samuel. “Grocery shopping is low emotion most of the time and it’s well-suited to agentic AI, which can execute on repetitive tasks time and time again, including meal planning, shopping with a budget and building baskets. That’s probably the biggest long-term opportunity for grocery retailers.”
First-movers have already begun to capitalize on AI’s potential. In the U.S., Walmart is a leader in this space, says Samuel. In 2025, Walmart launched Sparky, a GenAI assistant in the Walmart app that answers questions, provides recommendations, synthesizes reviews and compares options. According to Walmart, Sparky’s capabilities will continue to expand to solve consumers’ everyday problems and free up their time. For example, a “what’s for dinner?” prompt will serve up “a week of family-approved meal plans with ingredients automatically added to a cart,” Walmart said in a press release.
This year, Walmart announced its move into agent-led commerce, which it described as the next evolution in grocery retail. Through a partnership with Google’s AI chatbot, Gemini, Walmart and Sam’s Clubs will show up in responses to users’ queries when relevant, making it easier for shoppers to discover and buy products.
In Canada, Loblaw is at the forefront in AI, having recently announced partnerships with OpenAI and Google for AI-driven commerce. Loblaw said Canadians will soon be able to shop for health, beauty and apparel products directly through AI mode in Google Search and Google’s Gemini app. The retailer is also integrating its PC Express app into OpenAI’s ChatGPT, allowing customers to explore menu ideas, curate shopping lists and select suggested products to purchase on the PC Express app—all within the chatbot.
“This provides one seamless experience, start to finish, to simplify the lives and shopping experiences of Canadians,” said a Loblaw spokesperson in an email to Canadian Grocer. “And we’re adapting to the existing habits and behaviours of today’s consumer—about 58% of consumers are already using answer engines to shop. We’re now the first retailer in Canada to meet them where they already are.”
Amar Singh, senior director at Kantar, says initiatives like this allow retailers to keep shoppers in their own environment versus searching for best offers among competitors.
READ: Why agentic AI matters for in-store shopping
“Loblaw wants to contain that shopping trip within the retailer’s ecosystem, with their own inventory count and products,” he says. “That’s what the ploy here is—for retailers to keep their shoppers within their own ecosystem rather than cross-shopping with other competitors.”
For Loblaw, its loyalty program is one of its greatest advantages, says Singh. “You need good clean data to feed AI models—data is your currency in the age of AI,” he says. “And Loblaw does have very strong penetration in Canada in terms of the Canadians and households who are in the program.”
Singh also sees great potential in AI to elevate the discovery process. “Discovery is where it’s really at,” he says, adding that it will help consumers not only find what they’re looking for, but complementary products as well. “For example, if you look for cereal, it can then recommend milk. So that’s where the strength is for retailers—to build bigger baskets.”
Building bigger baskets is a key benefit of a new AI-powered charcuterie board kiosk at Calgary Co-op’s Oakridge store. Developed by CGS Immersive and powered by its AI platform Cicero, the kiosk acts as a “charcuterie sommelier,” creating a customized board based on a shopper’s budget, party size and product needs—using real-time store inventory. Shoppers can print the list and shop for the ingredients themselves or send it straight to deli staff for fast pickup.
Doug Stephen, president of CGS Immersive, says the technology has significant revenue-generating potential, boosting average deli tickets from $8 to $40, with the kiosk taking up just two square feet of space.
“What’s interesting is retailers could also subsidize [the cost] by going to their suppliers and giving them the prominence when it picks the type of meat or cheese,” he says. “So, it’s a way to make it cost-neutral.”
The kiosk also helps on the labour front. “Grocers don’t have a lot of people who can build these at times, and if it takes a while and people wait, they might walk out the door,” Stephen says. “This is a way to complement charcuterie masters that might be in the department and be able to meet that demand.”
For retailers just beginning to explore customer-facing AI uses, IGD’s Samuel suggests identifying their biggest pain point and where they’ll get the biggest return. “As a proof of concept, you want to prove that it has value within your organization,” he says. “Most companies are seeing a benefit from implementing AI within the businesses and those that are still skeptical just need to have the proof points.”
Data quality is another must. While e-commerce has been around for decades, Samuel says many retailers still lack unified systems and consistency in areas like real-time availability, which are prerequisites for agentic AI. “It’s very hard to do agentic AI unless you’ve got unified systems with data that’s clean and logical,” he says.
Kantar’s Singh notes that AI is a great opportunity for independent grocers especially. “This technology is an equalizer,” he says. “If they can use it for personalization and encourage shoppers to stay connected with their retail ecosystem, this will have a significant impact on their business.”
For larger retailers, “speed to action is important,” Singh says. “It’s about playing to their strengths. Leverage your loyalty database—that is the key. The bigger your loyalty database, the more data you have to play with, and then fine tune the personalization while maintaining trust.”
