As the first fully integrated service of its kind in South Africa, Penny, an AI-powered grocery shopping companion, has been launched by retailer Pick n Pay on its asap! grocery delivery platform.

The feature is available on the latest version of the Pick n Pay asap! app and was rolled out to all customers from July 6.

Instead of manually searching for products, customers can use voice, text or photos to tell Penny what they need, with the AI assistant then building their basket.

Retail executive: omnichannel Enrico Ferigolli says the feature changes how customers interact with grocery shopping platforms.

“On-demand delivery changed how people shop. AI is now changing how they order. We are moving from search-and-scroll shopping to conversation-led shopping, making grocery shopping faster and more intuitive,” he says.

Penny is powered by Google’s Gemini AI models and uses multimodal AI.

Google South Africa country director Kabelo Makwane says AI assistants are increasingly moving beyond answering questions to helping people complete tasks.

“The benefit of multimodal AI is that people do not have to adapt to technology. The technology adapts to them. Whether someone speaks, types or shares a photo, AI can understand their intent,” he says.

Ferigolli says Penny has been developed around South African shopping behaviour. It can be used to find products, complete weekly and top-up shops, assist with meal planning and recipes. 

Customers can shop conversationally in multiple languages, dictate shopping lists through voice notes, upload photos of handwritten shopping lists or recipe ingredients, and photograph products they want to order.

The assistant can also use photographs of ingredients in a customer’s fridge to suggest meals, provide recipes and add ingredients to a basket, suggest substitutions, and assist with meal planning, budgeting and entertaining ideas.

Moreover, it allows customers to reload their usual weekly basket or reorder a previous shop by request.

For each request, Ferigolli says Penny recommends products based on customer preferences, including quantity, brand and price. “Its integration with Smart Shopper allows recommendations to be personalised using previous purchases and shopping habits,” he comments.

Ferigolli says understanding customers’ purchasing and meal-planning needs allows Penny to provide a more personalised shopping experience.

Pick n Pay says the launch followed the re-platforming of asap! across its front and back ends last year, which it says has accelerated development.

“This gives us the ability to bring new AI-powered innovations to customers much faster, with more enhancements rolling out over the coming months. This is only the beginning of what AI can unlock for everyday grocery shopping”, Ferigolli concludes.