Grocery giant Albertsons has teamed with OpenAI to enhance its artificial intelligence (AI) offerings for shoppers and employees.
“Digital shopping, store operations, fulfillment, merchandising and customer experience all depend on systems that teams continually build, test and improve,” OpenAI said in a blog post announcing the partnership last week.
“Albertsons Cos. is expanding its use of AI across the organization to help teams navigate complexity, accelerate workflows and move promising ideas toward production faster.”
The company added that this work ties “the technology behind a shopping trip to practical decisions,” such as which product to promote, how to explain recommendations or how to help shoppers find ingredients for dinner.
Part of the partnership involves a new plug-in designed to help customers at Albertsons’ Safeway stores discover and consider product and complete shopping within ChatGPT.
“This is another practical way we are using AI to reduce friction and make everyday shopping easier,” said Jill Pavlovich, Albertsons’ senior vice president for digital customer experience.
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According to OpenAI, this offering expands on Albertsons’ AI shopping assistant and Ask AI capabilities and is planned to extend to the company’s other grocery brands, including Vons, Jewel-Osco, Shaw’s, ACME, Tom Thumb and Albertsons itself.
Beyond that, Albertsons is expanding its use of artificial intelligence across the company in an effort to help workers navigate complexity and put ideas into production more quickly.
“Behind the scenes, Albertsons Cos. is combining predictive models with generative AI to deliver explainable, data-driven recommendations and promotional insights, helping merchants evaluate business considerations and make more informed decisions,” OpenAI said.
This is backed by additional OpenAI-powered capabilities, employee tools and “commerce apps and advertising solutions that can be extended across the enterprise,” the company added.
Albertsons has already seen its artificial intelligence investments pay off, Pavlovich said in August. She said customers who begin using the company’s AI-driven online shopping experience make larger purchases almost immediately.
She told The Wall Street Journal that the company has seen the average order value of these customers increase 10% when they use Albertsons’ conversational search. Order value jumped 26% when shoppers employ more comprehensive assistants to find recipes and ingredients meeting their dietary preferences.
“When they’re using a more comprehensive experience, they’re adding even more [items to their basket] because they’re not forgetting items,” Pavlovich said.
Research by PYMNTS Intelligence has chronicled consumer interest in using AI at the supermarket, with 80% of so-called “power users” saying they were very or extremely interested in using agentic artificial intelligence for grocery management.
