Source: Radio New Zealand
123RF
Artificial intelligence could soon be helping you get your supermarket shopping done, but one AI expert is warning consumers to be wary of the potential trade-off.
Woolworths said it was working towards launching a new tool in partnership with Google.
It will use Google’s Gemini Enterprise AI to transform its chatbot, Olive, into a “shopping companion”.
It said Google and Woolworths would collaborate on the development of a “bespoke” version of the new AI tool over the coming months to customise it to Woolworths’ customers’ needs.
It would use insights collected by Olive over the past seven years.
There was no set timeline for the launch in New Zealand but Woolworths said Olive would eventually be able to help customers create weekly meal plans based on their preferences, identify specials and swaps to help shoppers stick to a budget, and act as a personal assistant when someone was shopping for a special occasion.
But Shahper Richter, a senior lecturer in marketing at the University of Auckland who has studied virtual worlds and genAI, said there were some points shoppers should be careful about.
“It’s classed as consumer convenience, but then you have to think who are they giving this data to?
“Are we going to have different brands asking to insert their brand or their products as a preference? If you always buy the same dishwashing liquid and then next time maybe a brand will start saying ‘oh can you suggest this to these types of consumers’ and you’ll end up always getting suggested their brand as opposed to your normal brand or cheaper brands.
“You just have to think who does it actually help, this kind of convenience?”
She said if AI was producing a ready made shopping basket for people, they were less likely to make changes to it than if products were being suggested individually, as is currently the case through Woolworths’ rewards boosts.
“If it gives you a pre-made basket because you said you wanted to make chicken tacos this week … Here’s everything you’re not going to go through and go, ‘oh, well, I don’t get this brand of tacos. I get another brand’ and so on.”
She said people often grew used to technological improvements and started to rely on them.
“When Google Maps was introduced, like suddenly everyone’s just forgotten how to get somewhere without it. .. I remember being like in the 90s, having map books and you’d really have to flip pages and think, OK, it’s the second road on the right and the left. And now you just you’re just on autopilot. Google Maps will just take me. And sometimes it takes you in weird directions. But you’re like, oh, well, it just knows better.
“Maybe Olive will become like that … we’ll think ‘maybe Olive knows something that we don’t’.
“I think we’re already being primed to accept things like that with some of what Woolworths already do, like with these rewards programs and the boosting it’s already kind of heading towards this. This just feels like another step and then another step.
“I think when they start rolling out this agentic Olive, they’ll just introduce something that looks very innocuous and very helpful … ‘based on your past five shops, you always got this. Do you want to get it again?’ And they already do that on online shopping. This will just be, oh, look, we’ve already added it to your basket. You can take it out.
“I think it won’t be now you have agentic doing everything … I think will be rolled out so slowly that we won’t even really notice it.”
Amanda Bardwell, chief executive and managing director for the Woolworths Group, said it would be a practical innovation that was “about us doing the heavy lifting for you, making shopping that little bit easier to give you time back in your day”.
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– Published by EveningReport.nz and AsiaPacificReport.nz, see: MIL OSI in partnership with Radio New Zealand
