Meet Penny, Pick n Pay’s new AI shopping companion

Pick n Pay is launching Penny, an AI shopping assistant built on Google's Gemini models, within its asap! delivery app. Penny lets customers build grocery baskets via text, voice, or photo — for example, asking for a recipe and getting ingredient options added to the cart. It supports multilingual input, can reference order history and Smart Shopper points via APIs, and is billed as South Africa's first conversational grocery shopping experience. Penny assembles baskets but does not yet place orders autonomously. The feature rolls out from 6 July. Pick n Pay also noted a retail-media layer is coming, allowing manufacturers to bid on conversational search terms. Rival Checkers Sixty60 launched a similar AI assistant called Pixie in April, though with a different philosophy focused on predictive replenishment rather than open conversation.

Source: https://techcentral.co.za/meet-penny-pick-n-pays-new-ai-shopping-companion/283301. 8 Sync News only summarizes and links out; content copyright belongs to the authors and original sources.