Separately, in February French grocery chain Carrefour produced its first-ever video made with ChatGPT answering FAQs. The 30-second video has a robot speaking in French and answering common questions from customers like "how to eat better and cheaper via its website." Carrefour's Chief E-commerce Officer Elodie Perthuisot wrote in a LinkedIn post that Carrefour Carrefour's "data and innovation teams are currently working on the use cases of ChatGPT, and generative AI in general." Analysts and grocery tech executives that Modern Retail spoke with said while all types of retailers are excited about using ChatGPT, grocers have compelling reasons to jump into this head first, for a few reasons. For starters, grocers have among the most diverse customer base.

In such fulfillment centers, the company will use robots to pull items from warehouses and have Instacart's workers pack and deliver orders. Instacart currently deploys shoppers who grab products from grocery stores and drop them off at people's homes. The company didn't say how many centers it will build, where they will be or how much it will invest. Warehouses, which will be automated, are expected to speed up the delivery process, the company said. San Francisco-based Instacart has grown sharply during the pandemic, as more consumers shifted their shopping online.

Prior to the pandemic, average grocery profits hovered around 2%, mostly due to transportation and logistical inefficiencies. Shifting product demand and sales compounded these issues, with stores now responsible for 10% of U.S. food waste. This over-ordering not only costs profitability, but forces retailers to increase prices to make up for the losses. In April 2020, grocery prices showed their steepest monthly increase in nearly 50 years, led by rising prices for perishables like meat and eggs. Shelf Engine, a Seattle-based startup cofounded in 2015, aims to make a change by tapping AI to help stores increase profits while reducing product waste.

Transaction data is like a friendship tie: both parties must respect the relationship and if one party exploits it the relationship sours. As data becomes increasingly valuable, firms must take care not to exploit their users or they will sour their ties. Ethical uses of data cover a spectrum: at one end, using patient data in healthcare to cure patients is little cause for concern. At the other end, selling data to third parties who exploit users is serious cause for concern.2 Between these two extremes lies a vast gray area where firms need better ways to frame data risks and rewards in order to make better legal and ethical choices.

Kroger Co. has spent years--and hundreds of millions of dollars--investing in technology to give it a digital edge in the grocery business. But when the coronavirus changed customers' buying habits overnight, the grocery chain wasn't as ready for the online shift as some of its competitors. The nation's biggest grocer, Kroger has poured money into projects ranging from a self-driving grocery delivery robot to a partnership to sell goods in China through Alibaba Group Holding Ltd. It also bet that a delivery model using remote fulfillment centers, popular in Europe, would resonate stateside. Yet, when the pandemic sent a tsunami of customers ordering groceries online for the first time, it was unable to meet higher demand. The wide-ranging investments slowed adoption of technology for grocery delivery, leaving Kroger behind some of its competitors, said former executives, current employees and a vendor.

Harris Farm Markets has deployed artificial intelligence (AI) modelling across its supply chain to get the right amount of fresh produce on its shelves at the time consumers want it. The growing grocery chain partnered with enterprise AI provider DataRobot to reduce its own data science workload and make accurate predictions about produce availability and customer demand. Head of IT Phil Cribb said the company began with a focus "very much" around fresh produce. "That equates to roughly about 50 percent of the business ad it's obviously highly seasonal, it fluctuates a lot. "Traditionally it's been very much'touch, feel, see'.

With the world's population on track to exceed nine billion by 2050, it's crunch time for a solution to sustainable food production. However, undermining efforts to feed the planet at every step are our attitudes to waste. Around a third of the total food produced in the world currently gets thrown away, with citizens of rich countries by far the worst offenders. For businesses in the food industry, fluctuating customer demand and inadequate access to data make it difficult to get quantities right. Innovating the supply chain is a clear solution to improving waste and delivering the kind of food services that consumers want.

The success and fast expansion of Amazon Go has led other retailers and venues to seek startup help ... [ ] for their own cashierless checkout-free stores. On Amazon's jobs site, a keyword search query for Amazon Go yielded 3,500 results, seeking to fill positions manning the cashierless stores and looking for a head of marketing for the concept and a wide variety of engineers and program managers. Meanwhile, six months after the first Amazon Go opened in New York in May, six stores are in operation in the city, including four located less than a mile from one another in Midtown Manhattan. Two more are scheduled to open soon in the city. Those job postings and the fact that Amazon Go is cropping up in busy commercial sections of New York are just the latest signal of the Seattle giant's ambition to further expand its Just Walk Out Shopping concept, which features in-house-built computer vision, sensor fusion and deep machine learning technologies similar to those used in self-driving cars.

The UK's top eight grocers can prevent £144 million in food waste each year if they use artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning (ML) in their supply chains, according to one technology company's predictions. Scientists at Blue Yonder, which provides solutions in AI and ML and was acquired by supply chain software company JDA in 2018, estimate that using the techniques they specialise in can significantly drive down industry food wastage in several key ways. They said by using the technology to improve demand forecasting, set the right price based on expiry dates, or sense transportation disruption, the top eight grocers – Tesco, Sainsbury's, Asda, Morrisons, Aldi, the Co-Operative, Waitrose and Lidl – can help the environment and their avoid lost sales. Morrisons has been using Blue Yonder's demand forecast and replenishment solution for several years now, and says it can make 430 million calculations and 13 million automatic decisions every single day thanks to the AI enablement. The grocer has reduced its stockholding in store by two to three days, and reduced wastage and markdowns as a result.

In the United States and Western Europe, many traditional grocery retailers are seeing their sales and margins fall--and things could get even worse. Here's how to reverse the trend. To put it bluntly, much of the $5.7 trillion global grocery industry is in trouble. Although it has grown at about 4.5 percent annually over the past decade, that growth has been highly uneven--and has masked deeper problems. For grocers in developed markets, both growth and profitability have been on a downward trajectory due to higher costs, falling productivity, and race-to-the-bottom pricing. One result: a massive decline in publicly listed grocers' economic value.