Walmart, Tesco and Albertsons Turn Dinner Questions Into Instant Carts

Grocery shopping has always started with a question: what’s for dinner? Retailers are trying to make sure it ends with them.

Tesco, Albertsons, and Walmart have deployed AI-powered shopping assistants that convert a meal question into a ready-to-checkout grocery basket.

Tesco launched a large-scale beta trial of an in-app assistant that uses conversational prompts to suggest recipes and add the required ingredients directly to a customer’s basket, with a full consumer rollout planned for later this year.

In the U.S., Albertsons deployed a similar agentic assistant across all of its banner websites, including Safeway, Vons, and Jewel-Osco, powered by OpenAI models and multiple collaborative agents.

Walmart took a broader swing. Its own assistant, Sparky,  takes a customer from question to cart and sits at the center of the retailer’s push into agentic commerce.

From Recipe to Cart in Minutes

Until recently, the standard digital grocery experience started with a keyword search and ended with a scroll through product results. The new tools work differently.

Tesco’s assistant uses two-way dialogue to suggest recipes based on dietary needs and then generates a basket from purchase history and preferences once a selection is made. The tool also accounts for ingredients already at home.

Tesco built the assistant with UK-based AI consultancy Tomoro AI, working in alliance with OpenAI, with development underway since last autumn. The company has doubled its technology team over the past five years and signed a three-year partnership with European AI startup Mistral.

Albertsons put a number on it. The assistant can take a shopper from recipe to cart in under four minutes, compared with an average grocery trip that takes about 46 minutes. The tool handles weekly meal plans, restocks frequently purchased items, and imports recipes from uploaded photos. CEO Susan Morris said on an October earnings call that the company’s goal is to combine digital experience initiatives with a promotional strategy to drive greater customer frequency.

Owning the Discovery

Each of these tools keeps discovery, selection and payment inside the retailer’s own platform. That matters as third-party AI systems grow capable of intercepting the same customer journey.

OpenAI recently confirmed it is ending Instant Checkout, the feature that allowed users to purchase directly through ChatGPT, and is shifting its focus to facilitating sales through retailers’ dedicated apps within the chatbot. The model maker said it’s now prioritizing search and product discovery, with checkout moving to apps where purchases happen more seamlessly, PYMNTS reported.

Google updated its shopping agent platform in March, enabling it to load real-time product data, let users add multiple items to carts, and connect loyalty memberships, PYMNTS reported. The changes addressed out-of-stocks and pricing errors that appeared in earlier versions.

A shopper who plans meals and builds a cart through a general-purpose AI platform takes transaction data and discovery behavior with them. The retailer loses visibility into what drove the purchase, what was considered and rejected, and which promotions landed.

Basket Size, Personalization and the Loyalty Calculus

A remembered list and an AI-generated basket are not the same thing. One is built around a full meal plan. The other is a handful of items and a hope.

Albertsons’ assistant captures context like dietary restrictions, group size and leftover preferences through two-way conversation, then delivers product recommendations tied to current deals and coupons, the company said. Each interaction feeds back into the retailer’s loyalty data, making subsequent visits more precise.

Tesco CEO Ken Murphy said the assistant has “the potential to transform the way people shop,” using AI to personalize the experience in ways that save time and reduce costs. The company has long used its Clubcard program to inform recommendations. The new assistant runs on the same data.

The rise of AI agents gives retailers “the ability to actively shape demand and influence which products end up in baskets at scale,” said Gabriel Corbett, co-founder and CEO of Mealia, a U.K.-based AI grocery app integrated with Tesco, Asda, Sainsbury’s and Morrisons. Corbett said the model also lets retailers direct demand toward at-risk inventory, improving margins and cutting waste.

Albertsons plans to expand the assistant to its mobile apps in 2026, adding budget optimization, in-store aisle location, and voice integration.

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