Artificial intelligence

Like retail media back in 2022, artificial intelligence is the buzziest concept in retail right now.

The rise of AI-powered tools like ChatGPT has led to retailers finding ways to integrate the flashy technology into their own operations. For example, Kroger launched a new personal shopping assistant through an expanded partnership with Google Cloud. Albertsons, meanwhile, is leveraging ChatGPT’s AI capabilities to test out conversational advertising formats to drive better consumer experiences. 

But data shows consumers aren’t married to the technology quite yet. According to Dunnhumby’s latest Consumer Trends Tracker, published in February 2026, only 15% of U.S. consumers are using AI tools for grocery shopping, citing trust as the main blocker. 

Even so, AI is a must-use technology for grocers looking to remain competitive. Rather than make it more accessible to shoppers, grocers are primarily equipping their store-level associates with this cutting-edge technology — something made clear during the National Retail Federation Big Show in New York City in January 2026. 

Grocers will continue to pilot technology that puts AI-powered tools into the hands of shoppers. But retailers’ main focus right now is on advancing store-level AI capabilities. 

Improving the employee experience

Grocers like Kroger say they’re using AI to cut through red tape for frontline associates in order to provide an improved in-store shopping experience while also ensuring smoother back-end operations.

Along with its growing partnership with Google, Kroger highlighted Sage, its AI virtual assistant that provides staffers with a single point of access to check their shift schedule, request time off, set shift availability and view their pay stubs. The tool also lets store and regional managers see real-time labor data insights as well as view changes at individual locations. 

Kroger isn’t the only grocer finding ways to consolidate employee systems with AI. Hy-Vee Senior Principal Product Manager Becky Olson spoke at NRF about how the regional grocer is using AI in partnership with Workday to streamline store- and department-level operations. 

At the store level, Hy-Vee established a single mobile app to replace what was previously a “fragmented” system for accessing important information like payroll, Olson said.  

“Employees are really focused on mobile — that was something [that is] really important to them,” she said. “And so when they’re having to log into multiple systems, have multiple logins and download multiple apps, it’s cumbersome for them.”

With the new AI system, store leaders no longer have to jump between systems. Olson noted that schedules that once had to be made from scratch can now be developed entirely with Workday’s AI technology, allowing store managers and department-level managers to simply “go in and make small tweaks and optimize.” 

“We wanted to reduce the amount of systems that our employees and our floor leaders were having to utilize to get the data they need and be able to drive the decisions much quicker and more efficiently,” Olson said. 

Advancing in-store retail media

In addition to streamlining worker operations, AI has also proven to be very useful in crunching consumer data to aid retail media networks and other functions.

“AI — it makes consumer data at mass so much more… processable,” Kelly Pedersen, a partner at PwC, said in an interview during NRF. “So I think, from a consumer perspective, we’re going to see a lot more personalization than we ever have before in retail media.” 

A crucial aspect of a successful retail media network is its ability to process real-time data that grocers can then use to personalize the shopping experience — something that is far trickier with in-store retail media efforts than digital ones, as it’s harder to track shoppers’ moves and decisions in-store. 

Generation Z customers are at the intersection of in-store and digital shopping, Pedersen noted, as they are both the biggest drivers of in-store traffic while also being the most digitally advanced. 

“[Gen Z] doesn’t necessarily shop in stores, but they like to be in stores. They shop digitally and in-store… So anything from an experiential perspective that improves the experience is what [grocers] are looking for,” he said. 

AI also shines on the advertising side of retail media, as the technology can quickly deliver recommendations for custom experiences, Pedersen said. This, in turn, allows advertisers, CPG partners and retailers themselves to simply modify campaigns autonomously created based on consumer data collected. 

“So retail media should be more effective, because the optimization cycles can run so much faster with processing all of that bigger data [using AI],” Pedersen said.

When Daniel Vitiello and Brandon Warman launched their Cooklist recipe-building app in 2018, the concept of using a computerized brain to converse with customers and automatically put groceries into an online cart was little more than a futuristic idea.

But while that kind of relationship between computers and humans was still years away, Vitiello and Warman were convinced from the start that artificial intelligence would eventually reach a point where it could handle almost every part of the shopping experience — and they set their sights on building such a tool.

“We set the mission of the company to ‘eat intelligently,’ which means [we were] going to try to combine the intelligence of a personal shopper, personal chef and nutritionist to help anticipate your needs and meet your goals, and really just eliminate all the friction with grocery shopping,” Vitiello said.

In June 2026, Cooklist officially announced that it had reached its goal and is now offering technology that lets grocers serve up an agentic shopping experience simply by integrating the startup’s code into their e-commerce platform. The company’s first customers include Wegmans and Kroger, which are now both offering shoppers who visit their websites an online assistant that lets them describe their needs and then receive a shopping cart loaded with suggested products.

Kroger banners that are now using Cooklist’s technology include Fred Meyer, Ralphs, Baker’s, Dillons, QFC and Smith’s, according to Cooklist.

Cooklist is not alone in making inroads with agentic AI technology in the grocery sector. In December 2025, Albertsons launched its own agentic AI shopping assistant. Third-party e-commerce providers like Instacart, DoorDash and Uber also offer agentic AI capabilities to grocers.

 

A Kroger spokesperson declined to comment about the company’s relationship with Cooklist, and Wegmans did not respond to a request for comment. However, AI assistants available to shoppers who log in to either retailer’s websites note that the tools are “powered by Cooklist.” Wegmans’ assistant alerts customers that the tool is in beta mode and asks them to affirm that they understand that it is experimental before using it.

Cooklist’s technology is now available to shoppers at seven grocers spanning over 700 U.S. stores, and the company expects to expand to about 700 more locations, the company said. The expansion includes 10 additional regional and national grocery banners, which the company did not name.

Vitiello said Cooklist is able to integrate its agentic AI technology into an e-commerce platform in about six weeks. He added that the company’s pitch includes allowing retailers to add agentic AI to their customer-facing systems without needing to develop the capabilities in-house or cede control of customer data to a third-party provider like Instacart, which many retailers rely on to provide AI-based shopping tools.

“Retailers own all their data [with Cooklist]. They have complete control of how everything works,” Vitiello said. “We really help tailor it to work the way that they want and integrate with their existing systems, so we’re finding that there’s an appetite for this type of a model right now.”

Cooklist’s technology has emerged not only as a tool to help people with online shopping but also as a way to drive people to brick-and-mortar stores, according to the company. About half of the people who use assistants based on Cooklist’s technology go into a store to complete their order, Vitiello said, adding that in some cases nearly a third of the queries grocers’ assistants are handling are support-related. The technology can also help guide people to products as they walk store aisles, he said.

“Something else that retailers are considering is … beyond just being a shopping assistant, how can it more generally help with the store operations and the load going to the customer support teams?” said Vitiello.

Warman noted that customers have shown a willingness to provide more details when they converse with its AI-based tool than when just typing details into a search engine. The average chat message from people who use Cooklist’s platform is about 50 characters long, while search queries are typically 10 characters in length.

“We’re getting about five times more context with each message from a user [and] that really gives us more of the intent behind their inquiries and [helps] to understand the ‘why’ behind what gets added to their basket,” Warman said.

Recent investments in AI by Amazon and Walmart have helped drive retailer interest in Cooklist, according to Vitiello.

“For years it felt like we were pushing the boulder up the hill of trying to sell and acquire customers, and [during] the past 12 months it’s just been the complete opposite, where we’ve been overwhelmed by demand,” he said.

Cooklist is also able to use intel from conversations customers have with its agentic AI system to glean insights for product and merchandising teams, Vitiello said.

“We actually have reports that we can generate from the interactions with the assistant that then go out to the produce team and the meat and deli team and the dry goods team … that’s where we’re kind of connecting this digital voice of the customer back to all the departments within a retailer,” he said.

Sponsored content

By Instacart

Artificial intelligence is reshaping grocery retail faster than most businesses can track. Retailers are under pressure to curate AI-powered consumer experiences at scale, keep digital and physical shelves stocked, and extract meaningful insights from data that was previously too complex to act on quickly.  But grocery retail doesn’t transform overnight. The path from a basic digital presence to a fully connected, AI-powered operation runs through distinct stages, each layer building on the last.

Understanding where your business is on that digital maturity curve matters because it shapes what's possible: what your teams can do, what your customers experience, and how efficiently your business runs. Each retailer must then decide where your greatest opportunities exist for AI to create sustainable, scalable solutions. You're great at running a grocery business and all it entails; you understand your customers better than anyone. Do you also want to take on the management of hundreds of AI agents? Do you want to own organizing data pipelines for those agents, or staying on top of model evolutions that change every three to six months?

Maybe for some of those things, the answer is yes. For others, you may want a partner who does that day in and day out so you can focus on where you uniquely create differentiated value.

Instacart has amassed deep industry context over time, through more than 14+ years of earned experience in grocery. Supporting more than 1.6 billion aggregated lifetime orders*, 2,200+ retail banners and nearly 100,000 stores*, and 26+ million annual customers*, Instacart has developed the expertise to understand how people actually shop: how they search, what they substitute, and how they interact with what's on the shelf. That understanding of the industry at scale allows Instacart to create solutions that are purpose-built for grocery. The below resources explore more about how Instacart is thinking about, and building solutions for, the AI-era of grocery retail:

• AI Solutions for All Grocers
• Connecting Stores From Edge to Cloud: Reinventing Retail with Physical AI
• Cart Assistant from Instacart: the AI-Powered Shopping Assistant Retailers Can Make Their Own
• Instacart intelligence: The Earned Experience Behind The Aisle

Grocery shopping is personal. What a consumer puts in their cart reflects the rhythms of their household — their dietary preferences, the meals they keep coming back to, and the new recipes they’ve been meaning to try. At its best, grocery shopping is how people take care of those they love. Instacart’s AI solutions are built around that idea: that the right technologies, deployed in the right ways, can give people more time for what actually matters — time spent together.

 

*as of December 31, 2025.

Brookshire Brothers has implemented Cognira’s artificial-intelligence-powered management tool for promotions, the Texas-based grocer announced.

Called PromoAI, the tool uses AI and advanced analytics to help retailers better execute and analyze promotions.

The announcement noted that Brookshire Brothers chose the unified, AI-powered platform because it will give customers more relevant offers and provide the grocer with automated workflows and performance analytics.

With the implementation of the technology done, Brookshire Brothers can now plan and manage promotions from a single, centralized platform accessible across functions as well as more accurately forecast promotions’ financial outcomes. The tool will also allow the grocer to evaluate a promotion’s effectiveness and reduce inefficiencies.

Other retailers, including Weis Markets, Schnuck Markets, Cub Foods and Rite Aid, have also linked up with Cognira, according to the tech vendor’s website.

Brookshire Brothers’ effort to optimize its promotions comes at a time when boosting value has been paramount for grocers looking to soothe customer worries about food costs. 

The grocery industry has recently seen a swarm of price cuts, limited-time deals and updates to loyalty programs as food affordability concerns persist among consumers. Stop & Shop, for example, is offering a weekly rotating selection of $1 and under deals across departments, including fresh produce, snacks, beverages and household essentials, for a limited time.

Grocery Outlet is deploying a multi-category ordering solution from artificial intelligence technology company Afresh, according to an announcement. With the partnership, Grocery Outlet will use Afresh across its fresh, center store and general merchandise departments. 

The partnership comes at a time when Grocery Outlet is looking to modernize its supply chain inventory management and ordering, Afresh Chief Revenue Officer Adam Litle said in an interview.

Afresh said the tie-up will help Grocery Outlet reduce shrink and improve margins. Litle noted that, across its partnerships, Afresh has seen workers halve the time they spend on orders while retailers, on average, increase sales by 3% and reduce shrink by 25%.

The discounter is the first retailer to use Afresh’s full-store, multi-category technology, which the tech vendor unveiled earlier in 2026 after initially focusing on rolling out solutions for fresh perimeter categories.   

“This investment is about simplifying and modernizing operations for our independent operators, and equipping stores with world-class tools that help them make smarter decisions every day,” Frank Kerr, chief store operations officer at Grocery Outlet, said in a statement.

Grocery Outlet considered various vendors, and Afresh stood out because of the flexibility that its AI-powered technology provides for retailers with quick-changing assortments, Litle said.

“A part of the reason [Grocery Outlet] chose us is because there’s also a lot of metrics and information in our dashboards where they can get real-time information at an organization level and a store level all the way down to an item level,” Litle said.

Grocery Outlet has approximately 550 stores across 16 states. Afresh noted that its technology provides each of Grocery Outlet’s stores with recommendations based on their own demand patterns and that store operators will only need to review inventory that Afresh’s system flags. Litle noted that Afresh’s adherence rate — the measure of how closely supply chain operations align with planned targets — is 94%.

Grocery Outlet’s corporate teams will have visibility into store-level ordering and performance, Afresh noted.

At the end of 2025, Albertsons launched an agentic shopping assistant that can take shoppers from a vague query — “I’m in the mood for something spicy” — to an online basket full of products along with the recipes they need to prepare everything.

Five months later, the grocer rolled out another notable but decidedly less glamorous tool — a proprietary program that its warehouse workers can use to quickly determine if pallets of fresh strawberries meet the company’s quality standards.

These two artificial intelligence-powered initiatives underscore the speed at which retailers are moving to capture the benefits of the rapidly evolving technology. But according to experts, one of these programs is a lot more valuable than the other right now. 

While AI-powered chatbots and personalized recommendations may garner headlines and drive industry buzz, back-end tools can tackle challenges that have bedeviled grocers for decades. These concerns include shrink, escalating labor costs, complex promotions and setting the right price at the right time for consumers.

Grocers see the potential in operational AI and have made strategic investments. But they can’t just approach this as a plug-and-play strategy, experts say.

Forging partnerships with tech companies can work in the short term, but harnessing the full power of AI will require grocers to clean up and connect their data, sources said. Retailers will also need to break down organizational silos, clearly define their business objectives and altogether prepare their companies for an agentic future, they noted.

“Executives across retail simply see AI as a new technology that can help do things better and faster … but they've not understood that it really signifies a transformation in how the operating model of retail works,” said Gary Hawkins, founder and CEO of the Center for Advancing Retail & Technology.

Addressing pain points in the near term

Operational AI solutions are tackling a wide range of challenges across grocers’ backrooms, warehouses and corporate offices. Hy-Vee recently partnered with Relex to improve its fresh product forecasting, ordering and replenishment, for example, while Heritage Grocers Group is using an AI-powered system to scale pricing promotions. Grocery Outlet announced it’s incorporating a system from Afresh that will sharpen ordering across departments.

Retail media, store circulars, planograms and stock levels also have AI enhancements that retailers can license. AI is even tackling worker engagement, as Kroger has shown with Sage, a virtual assistant for employees that helps them manage their schedules and store tasks.

Curt Prins, a senior product manager for Albertsons who has also worked for Kroger and writes extensively about grocery AI for his Substack newsletter, said back-end AI solutions can provide a much better return on investment than flashy consumer-facing tools. And getting started can be as straightforward as determining where operational pain points lie, he said.

Although industry giants like Walmart and Amazon are renowned for their in-house AI capabilities, regional grocers and even independent grocers can also use AI solutions to cut waste and boost accuracy across their operations, giving them a better chance of competing with larger rivals. 

“[Grocers] don’t need a 2,000-head technology team to do this,” Prins said. “They can make smart partnerships and focus on impact as opposed to the bright and shiny things.”

The problem is that grocers will struggle to get the full benefit of these AI solutions if those tools are feeding off company data that is disjointed and incomplete, said Prins.

Bad data management can also undercut consumer-facing efforts. A shopper might get a personalized promotion but if that product isn’t in stock, then the effort becomes a customer loyalty problem, he noted.

“AI is a capability, not a strategy,” Prins said.

A priority for grocers working with back-end AI solutions should be cleaning up their internal data, said Tom Furphy, a former Amazon and Wegmans executive who is CEO and managing director of venture capital firm Consumer Equity Partners. But retailers don’t need to fully accomplish this before diving in.

“You don’t necessarily have to wait completely until your data is fixed or is ready, but don’t go too far with AI on top of that data because it’s going to give you bad signals,” said Furphy.

Looking ahead to agentic retailing

Beyond the one-off AI tools that retailers are deploying lies a tantalizing future in which more of grocers’ operations are not just automated, but agentic. Walmart and Amazon have already made considerable strides here. Walmart, for instance, uses agentic AI tools to get a unified view of inventory across its stores and supply facilities.

Experts aren’t sure what agentic retailing will look like several years from now, but they are confident that AI-powered operations will get faster, smarter and more connected.

Key roles like category manager will change dramatically. Agentic technology could, for example, improve managers’ ability to negotiate with vendors by seamlessly drawing data from across the enterprise and running several test scenarios instead of just one, said Bobby Gibbs, principal with management consulting firm Oliver Wyman.

Advanced AI will eventually be able to automate assortment planning, price optimization and other tasks within parameters set by category managers, said Hawkins.

“What’s happening is that retail is moving from human speed to machine speed,” he said.

Moving toward agentic retailing requires retailers to become less organizationally siloed and more connected through data. Hawkins advocates building a “data fabric” that runs like a spine across all facets of the business, allowing AI to draw information from across the enterprise in order to make informed, holistic decisions. 

Preparing for an agentic future is less about picking the right technology and more about navigating change management, said Capri Brixey, a partner with consultancy The Partnering Group who works with companies on AI strategy. Because advanced AI promises to speed up and improve decision-making, a top-down organizational structure may prove cumbersome for retailers, she said, noting that many companies are moving to a more diffuse internal structure — commonly known as a matrixed organization — as they pave the way for AI.

Retailers will need to streamline decision-making, open up pipelines for innovation and effectively measure progress in a fast-moving AI-enabled environment, Brixey said. 

“The companies seeing the best outcomes are investing as much in enablement and process redesign as they are in technology,” she explained.

Retailers like Dollar General and Ahold Delhaize have recently made hires for AI-specific leadership roles. Companies don’t necessarily need an AI guru in the C-suite to unlock the benefits of the rapidly evolving technology, but they do need buy-in from the very top of the company, sources said.

“This has got to be driven by the CEO. It’s got to be driven by the boards. It’s got to be driven by the owners,” said Hawkins.

A bumpy road to AI enablement

It’s one thing to lay out all the waypoints on the road to agentic retailing, but quite another to actually reach them.

Retooling an organization is a complex and risky undertaking that grocery CEOs won’t embark on without considerable assurance that it will be worthwhile, sources said. And right now, the mood is more cautious than emboldened, they noted. Many grocers are reluctant to even forge AI partnerships with tech companies because they’re unsure if they’ll get a sufficient return on their investment, said Gibbs.

A 2025 survey by FMI — The Food Industry Association found that just 47% of grocers reported using AI in their operations, compared with 93% of suppliers who said they do. Large grocers are significantly more likely to use the technology, however, with 77% saying they use AI and 74% saying they use generative AI.

“Food retailers operate on a narrow profit margin, currently an average of 1.7%, which means their investments need to be strategic, and they are not often fast followers,” Steve Markenson, vice president of research and insights at FMI, said in emailed comments.

Company leaders also have to address concerns from workers about the impact AI will have on their jobs and the overall labor market. Ninety percent of job seekers in a recent joint survey by Express Employment Professionals and Harris Poll said they have growing concerns about AI in the workplace.

The technology is also proving to be more costly than many companies anticipated. Walmart recently capped the amount of agentic AI workers can use after usage costs exploded, Bloomberg reported in June 2026. The Economist warned recently that the cost of AI, which requires significant processing power, “could spiral out of control.”

Does all of this mean the AI revolution will be yet another disruptive force that widens the performance gap between the industry’s largest players and smaller competitors?

Not necessarily, sources say.  

Furphy said embracing operational AI will allow independent grocers and small chains to become more nimble and better able to compete against rivals that rely on legacy systems and processes. Brixey, meanwhile, emphasized that the main challenge lies in how leadership approaches the issue, not how much investment capital the company has.

“Finding the resources to be able to implement AI is not difficult. It’s about making your organization ready to take advantage of it, and being able to effectively measure the outcome,” she said.

Gibbs noted that he’s worked with the CEO of a five-store retailer who requires employees to use Microsoft Copilot, an AI-powered conversational assistant, in their day-to-day work.

“There’s a level of capability that does require major capital investment, but there’s also some cultural change that doesn’t require that kind of investment,” he said.

Hawkins believes the performance gap between companies that embrace advanced AI and those that don’t will be considerable — existential, even.

“I think we’re going to see more change in the next 24 to 36 months than we’ve seen in the last three or four decades,” he said.

Albertsons’ retail media division announced the integration of sponsored product placement into the grocery company’s artificial intelligence-powered conversational search tool. The capability, powered by commerce intelligence platform Criteo, enables brands to influence shoppers as they plan meals, search for products and build baskets. 

The announcement comes as the rapid evolution and ongoing adoption of AI in the grocery industry provide new advertising capabilities for retailers and CPGs.

As shoppers continue to use AI to streamline their grocery shopping and planning, Albertsons Media Collective is further bringing this capability in-house — and this latest integration also aligns brands closer with shoppers at points of high purchase intent.

Albertsons said its expanded partnership with Criteo modernizes its existing conversational search feature. Now, select sponsored products can appear within Albertsons’ search product carousels that are relevant to shoppers’ search queries, according to the press release. 

“This integration is about creating retail media that helps customers along their shopping journey, showing up in ways that are useful and additive to their experience, while giving advertisers a new path to engage closer to the moment of purchase,” Jill Pavlovich, Albertsons’ senior vice president of digital customer experience, said in a statement. 

This is not the first time Albertsons Media Collective has looked to third-party partnerships to enhance its in-house retail media operations. The company has tapped Collective TV, Rokt and Capgemini in the past, and also worked with Criteo in early 2023 to improve access to demand- and supply-side advertising capabilities to drive measurable commerce outcomes.

Recently, Albertsons Media Collective announced it has started offering branded entertainment that leverages first-party data and can be distributed through the grocer’s media network.

As more consumers use AI to help them shop for groceries, many major retailers are relying on Instacart as their main avenue to the fast-evolving shopping capability, according to a report from AI enablement firm AstraWorks.

The firm’s AI shopping benchmark, which incorporates observations gathered across two dozen retailers in May 2026, found that most don’t have their own AI shopping tools or their own direct link with AI shopping agents like ChatGPT and Claude. Of the 18 grocers shoppable through ChatGPT, 16 are connected to it via Instacart’s integration.

Despite Instacart’s early advantage, AstraWorks’ report noted that retailers like Albertsons and Wegmans are forging unique paths for AI shopping.

Just as it did with e-commerce more than a decade ago, Instacart has jumped out ahead as a key service provider for grocers navigating yet another potentially transformative shopping capability.

The grocery tech company launched its ChatGPT integration tool in December 2025, and for many retailers, that represents the main AI shopping capability available in these early days of agentic commerce, according to the report. AstraWorks’ report lists 11 retailers — including Publix, Schnuck Markets, H-E-B and Ahold Delhaize USA — as “platform-dependent” for AI shopping capabilities.

“These retailers have little or no onsite capability, and most of their external agent presence is carried by Instacart,” the report noted. “Take the Instacart integration away and most of their agentic commerce score goes to near zero.”

AstraWorks noted this sort of third-party integration comes with trade-offs for retailers.

“A retailer that reaches AI shoppers through Instacart has a working path to the consumer, but less control over the interface, intelligence layer, data capture, and long-term differentiation,” the report stated.

This dynamic echoes a similar one that grocers navigated as they became increasingly reliant on Instacart for online sales. Ultimately, many major retailers continued to rely on the tech provider — as well as competitors like DoorDash and Uber — while also building their own websites, pickup services and other capabilities.

AstraWorks ranked the 24 retailers according to their agentic AI shopping capabilities across factors like whether or not retailers had proprietary AI shopping tools, the presence of AI shopping assistants on websites and apps, and integrations with third-party AI agents like ChatGPT. Amazon unsurprisingly took the top spot with a score of 63 out of 100. Walmart scored second with a 49, while Albertsons and Wegmans tied for third with 38. Most retailers scored 10-24 points on the index, earning them the designation of “starters” in AI shopping by AstraWorks. 

Wegmans earned a higher score than many other grocers because it uses an AI assistant powered by Cooklist and is also integrated with Instacart’s ChatGPT tool. Albertsons, meanwhile, has built its own AI shopping assistant and also has direct connections with Claude, Gemini and Perplexity.

Whole Foods Market, notably, only scored 9 points while discount retailers Trader Joe’s, Dollar General and WinCo Foods rounded out the bottom three.

As grocers navigate AI as a tool for both their shoppers and their internal operations, they face difficult decisions over who to partner with and whether they can build capabilities on their own. Building proprietary tools is expensive but helps retailers control the experience and retain valuable data that can further advance AI capabilities, while partnerships can help retailers ramp up quickly but can mean losing control of valuable data.

“The trajectory of agentic commerce's rise as a key shopping channel is an open question in the retail industry. Whether it remains largely a discovery surface or quickly gives rise to a significant share of automated transactions is an active debate,” the report noted.

Associated Wholesale Grocers has fully deployed its artificial intelligence-powered meal planning and shopping assistant, according to a press release. 

Dubbed SmartMeals, the tool allows participating AWG independent grocery members to provide personalized AI shopping experiences for their customers.

AWG said SmartMeals aims to help independent grocers compete alongside national chains, which are ramping up AI-powered tools and features for their customers.

AWG partnered with Breez AI, which powers SmartMeals, back in 2024 with the goal of creating an “easy-to-deploy” AI solution for independent grocers that was practical and could drive loyalty and revenue opportunities, according to the press release. 

“SmartMeals enables our members to compete with national chains and provide consumers a smarter personal shopper assistant that matches or surpasses other AI tools in functionality and user experience,” Shelly Moore, AWG’s chief information officer, said in a statement. “We now have nearly 100 stores onboarded, with a strong pipeline including some of our largest members.”

For shoppers, the AI-powered tool gives personalized meal planning based on dietary needs and health considerations, tailored “budget-smart” recommendations and step-by-step recipes. For retailers, it allows them to create custom-branded experiences and tap into retail media opportunities through personalized product recommendations, according to the announcement. 

Breez AI founder and CEO Tal Zlotnitsky noted that SmartMeals integrates directly into grocers’ existing online platforms while protecting customer privacy. 

SmartMeals has already produced strong results, including a 22% increase in average basket size and a 72% increase in loyalty sign-ups at participating stores, according to James Neumann, AWG’s senior vice president of sales and support.