Innovation

Wake-up call: Woolies and Pick n Pay forge new digital channels, while Spar admits it's late to the game.

In the fiercely contested on-demand grocery space, the three largest players are aggressively using AI to improve discoverability, surface recipe ideas and make shopping simpler and quicker. All are using the technology in different ways: Checkers is focusing on predicting items that a shopper will likely purchase (or reorder), Woolworths will surface meal ideas for customers, while Pick n Pay has implemented full chat functionality that straddles both of these worlds.

The Shoprite Group, currently by far the market leader with its Sixty60 platform, was the first to move when it rolled out its “Pixie” personalised shopping assistant in April. Because of its scale – some estimates put its share of the market at over 80% – the group first made Pixie available to its XtraSavings Plus subscriber base. Sixty60 sales for Shoprite’s current fiscal, ending in June, will comfortably exceed R25bn and could near R30bn. When announcing the launch, Neil Schreuder, chief strategy and innovation officer for the Shoprite Group, said shopping used to be something you did. “But now, it’s something Pixie, your personalised shopping assistant, handles for you. It’s shopping, magically simplified.”