Getting AI to do the grocery shopping: It’s closer than you think

6 hours ago 3

Opinion

November 4, 2025 — 3.43pm

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.

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.

Coles announced last month it would deploy ChatGPT enterprise at scale as part of its new collaboration with OpenAI – but at this stage only with administration staff.

It said integration of ChatGPT internally, powered by OpenAI’s latest advanced GPT-5 model, will help Coles corporate teams speed up research, reduce administrative tasks, surface data insights, support compliance and fuel idea generation.

The sophistication of our payments system is a clear enabler in ushering in the next step in online shopping.

Supermarket customers in Australia are still living a pretty analogue experience. Most customers walk up and down the aisles in person, run their purchases through a checkout (staffed or automated) and then lug the goods to the car.

There’s a growing cohort that chooses to shop for groceries online with delivery or click-and-collect but even this is a long way from cutting-edge.

According to global consulting firm McKinsey, agentic commerce is “shopping powered by AI agents acting on our behalf – it moves us toward a world in which AI anticipates consumer needs, navigates shopping options, negotiates deals and executes transactions, all in alignment with human intent yet acting independently via multistep chains of actions enabled by reasoning models”.

So basically it’s outsourcing your grocery shopping to an AI assistant. And McKinsey predicts that by 2030 the US could see up to $US1 trillion in orchestrated revenue from agentic commerce, with global projections reaching as high as $US3 trillion to $US5 trillion.

New AI frontiers, like agentic commerce and its immense potential, should give some pause to those willing to write off the breakneck investment in AI as a bubble. Despite the $US400 billion that the big US tech companies have invested in AI this year alone, developing services that work at scale requires a lot of money.

And the type of disruption it can bring to a sector like retail means that every big supermarket operator will be keeping a close eye on what Walmart is doing.

The question for Australia is whether consumers are ready for this AI revolution.