Albertsons Adds Sponsored Product Discovery to AI Grocery Search

Albertsons has launched a new integration with commerce intelligence platform Criteo.

The partnership, announced Thursday (June 25) by the grocery giant’s retail media arm Albertsons Media Collective, is designed to bring product discovery into Albertsons artificial intelligence-powered conversational search.

“As customers increasingly turn to AI-driven tools for inspiration and guidance, Albertsons Media Collective is helping brands participate in key planning and shopping moments that are closer to purchase,” the company said in a news release. “The integration modernizes the app search experience by surfacing ads naturally within conversational discovery.”

With Criteo, eligible sponsored products can appear inside AI-powered conversational search product carousels, directing customers to relevant items while offering advertisers a natural way to appear within the shopping journey, the release added.

“As shoppers use AI and conversational experiences to explore options, brands have an opportunity to put customers first by connecting them to the right products in the moments that matter, meeting their needs with relevance while making retail media feel effortless and organic,” said Jill Pavlovich, Albertsons senior vice president for digital customer experience.

“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.”

The new partnership is the latest example of Albertsons’ embrace of AI. The company last month launched Intelligent Quality Control, a tool for the chain’s distribution centers designed to visually inspect grapes and berries to determine if they are still fresh.

“Produce quality inspection has always been a human problem with a human-shaped flaw,” PYMNTS wrote. “The same item might grade differently depending on the inspector, the shift, the warehouse or the hour. Across a network like Albertsons’ 22 distribution centers and 2,244 stores, small inconsistencies can compound.”

And during an earnings call at the start of the year, Albertsons said that its Ask AI search capability was yielding a 10% increase in basket size for those customers using it.

Meanwhile, PYMNTS wrote earlier this year about one of the challenges facing businesses when it comes to retail media: nearly half of all retail shoppers did not notice an offer made via these channels during their most recent purchase.

“Among those who do find them, most offers require multiple steps to redeem, and only a small minority are automatically applied at checkout,” PYMNTS wrote in April. “That gap directly affects whether retail media can do what it is designed to do — which, in a nutshell, boils down to changing consumer behavior.”