I bet my wife I could do our grocery shop in five minutes with AI. I was wrong

Last week, my wife mentioned that I hadn’t pulled my weight on the weekly grocery shop, so I responded as any 40-year-old procrastinator would. Not by jumping in the car to head off and do the shopping. Instead, I told her I could do it in five minutes using AI. She bet me I couldn’t.
Spoiler alert: she won.

So how did I set it up? I used the ChatGPT in-app browser, which lets the AI browse websites like a human. Instead of me opening a supermarket website, finding bananas and adding them to my cart, I could enter a prompt into ChatGPT to order bananas, and it would open the website and do the clicking for me.

Grocery shops are more complex than I realised. I connected it to our family Google Calendar
and asked it to find a delivery window between weekend sport and kids’ parties. I gave it a
spreadsheet of our favourite recipes for our suggested meals for the week.

Then I told it things I would normally keep in my head while shopping, such as that we have two kids, we need school snacks and my wife likes pot-set yoghurt. Once that was done, I typed “let’s shop!”

ChatGPT asked what food we still had from last week, suggested a meal plan and, once I approved it, it turned that into a shopping list. It even considered whether to go to Harris Farm or Woolworths (Coles isn’t close) based on our budget and how much fresh food we needed. This stage took a further 34 minutes (so nearly an hour all up) and the shopping arrived 1.5 hours later. Here’s what I learned.

The AI makes mistakes. When I noticed the shop was lean on fruit, I asked it to include a fruit box. Instead, it selected a fruit and vegetable box. Other mistakes were my own fault. I told ChatGPT that we prioritised ethically sourced products, so before adding Tony’s Chocolonely to the shopping cart, it evaluated every available chocolate option. I could have saved it time by telling it our preferred brands.

Some of this comes down to preferences that are surprisingly hard to write down. There is a lot more human thought that goes into a grocery shop than I gave it credit for. I should add that ChatGPT noted its mistakes and assured me our next shop will take under 15 minutes.
Supermarkets may not want us to use AI.

ChatGPT can read my Google Calendar directly because Google has built a connector for it. Australian supermarkets haven’t done the same for AI shopping. That means ChatGPT couldn’t simply send Harris Farm my shopping list and order it. Instead, it had to do what I would do – open the website, search for yoghurt, choose one, click “add to cart”, then search for the next item. And the next one.

There is an emerging way for AI to interact with other services, called the Model Context
Protocol, or MCP. This gives the supermarkets a purpose-built AI front door. I suspect
supermarkets may be in no hurry to roll this out. AI is the worst customer a supermarket could imagine. It buys exactly what’s on the list – not the Cadbury Creme Egg at the checkout or that item that’s on special that you don’t really need (yes, I’m guilty).

In the book Spousonomics, Paula Szuchman and Jenny Anderson apply the theory of comparative advantage to household chores. Their point is that you shouldn’t split each chore 50-50. Instead, allocate each chore to whoever is better at it, or in some cases simply whoever prefers it. My wife actually enjoys the shopping. Her complaint wasn’t about the shopping at all – it was that I hadn’t pulled my weight. So this may not have been the best chore to test AI out on.

Would I grocery shop with AI again? I don’t know. Even though AI delivered us a shop on time and well under budget, it didn’t materially save us time, and there’s beauty in the humanity of a grocery shop. The act is sometimes the point.

That said, last month, our prime minister released an AI policy boldly stating that Australia needed to “shape the future rather than letting the future of AI shape us”. That doesn’t just require policies on data centres and copyright. It requires us all to stay curious and experiment with AI to understand whether it can and should deliver the promises of efficiency in our daily lives.

Kirk Simmons is a technology lawyer and the founder of Briefcase, an Australian AI legal technology company.