Running out of time to make your shopping list or running out of inspiration? Now a robot can do it for you. Named “Hopla”, it will be accessible from Friday on the home page of the Carrefour website. All you have to do is start a conversation with this smart assistant and wait a few seconds for a shopping list, recipes or for it to compose your basket itself.
Concretely, you can send him a request, like this: “I don’t know what to eat next week, there are four of us and I have a budget of 50€.” Hopla complies and then displays five recipes, from spaghetti Bolognese, to zucchini gratin, to mushroom omelet. He then lists the ingredients to make these dishes, while taking into account common products that you would have at home such as salt, pepper or olive oil. Once the products are displayed, they are added to your basket in one click and all you have to do is order them and pick them up in store or at your home. Your shopping is therefore carried out in the blink of an eye.
To achieve this technology, Carrefour has teamed up with the Open AI group, creator of the ChatGPT artificial intelligence. “We are the first to use this technology in France”, rejoiced this Thursday Alexandre Bompard during the presentation of the project. For the general manager of Carrefour, the objective is to “take a step ahead and invent the commerce of tomorrow”. The company has thus appointed experts in artificial intelligence, who have been working on this initiative for five weeks.
In order to avoid any AI drift, the team restricted ChatGPT to only answer food-related questions. “I am not authorized to answer,” he writes if the request is off topic. The experts also sent him all the codes necessary to offer a personalized experience to the user. Customers have the option of asking for organic, gluten-free or even vegetarian items. Note that no data is transmitted to Open AI, except discussions with the robot.
Regarding the recipes offered, the Carrefour teams assure it, the objective is to promote waste reduction and “eating better”, while “staying on the season”, especially for fruits and vegetables. Regarding the products highlighted, it is “the most purchased” or “the most clicked” on the site, explains the group. To change brand, just click on a reference to see similar products appear.
If artificial intelligence allows customers to save time, it is also beneficial for employees and the marketing aspect of the group. Indeed, in just a week and a half, ChatGPT has enriched the product sheets with more than 2,000 Carrefour brand references. Title, description, nutritional values… everything has been written by artificial intelligence, validated by Carrefour and published on its site. This constitutes a significant time saving for the group but also for the manufacturers who made these products.
If this is an innovation in France, Carrefour is not the only company to trust “generative” artificial intelligence. Coca-Cola announced its collaboration with ChatGPT last February. “We see opportunities to improve our marketing with cutting-edge AI while exploring ways to improve our operations and business capabilities,” Group CEO James Quincy said in a statement at the time. The e-commerce site editor Shopify also integrated ChatGPT on its site on March 1st. Like Carrefour, technology is used to generate responses to customers and advise them of the products best suited to their needs.
The American company Instacart, which delivers food products, has also been using artificial intelligence since March. Using the same model as Carrefour, users can ask questions about food, request recipe ideas or draw up a list of healthy ingredients. For the French group, the first feedback from customers in the coming days will allow it to enrich its Hopla robot and refine its responses. It remains to be seen whether other distributors will follow Carrefour’s lead in developing tomorrow’s consumption.
