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South African retail group Pick n Pay is launching an AI-powered shopping assistant named Penny for customers using its home-delivery platform.
The platform, called asap!, is in competition with Checkers Sixty60, the runaway leader in supermarket on-demand home delivery in the country. Shoprite, which owns the Checkers brand, recently launched its own an AI-powered shopping assistant, named Pixie, for Sixty60 clients.
Business Day, a South African business newspaper, has referred to Penny as the latest move in an “arms race” between supermarket chains for dominance in grocery home-delivery shopping services.
Penny is powered by Google’s Gemini large-language model and the chatbot will be able to help customers build shopping baskets, answer questions, and generally assist with ‘smart shopping’.
It operates in multiple languages and shoppers can build a grocery basket by asking for what they want in their own words – using voice, text or photograph – instead of searching and scrolling through product listings.
Customers can also ask the chatbot to reorder a previous shop, plan a meal to a budget or suggest product substitutions.
Retailer plans a phased rollout for Penny
Penny is scheduled to report for duty from 6 July 2026 as part of a phased rollout. Pick n Pay held a launch event in Johannesburg on Thursday, 2 July for local media.
Enrico Ferigolli, Retail Executive for Omnichannel, told journalists that on-demand delivery has changed how South Africans shop and AI is now changing how they order. “We’re moving from search-and-scroll shopping to conversation-led shopping,” he said.
“Whether you’re planning dinner, building your weekly shop or looking for recipe inspiration, Penny turns a simple conversation into a completed grocery basket,” Ferigolli states in a LinkedIn post.
“This launch is the result of months of collaboration between the teams at Pick n Pay and Google, and it’s just the beginning of what AI can unlock for everyday grocery shopping.
“For years, we’ve searched, scrolled and filtered to buy groceries online. That’s about to change.”
Comments the Daily Investor financial news website: “Pick n Pay’s investment in asap! over the past year is bearing fruit, with its most recent results for the 2026 financial year showing that its online segment grew turnover by 32.7% on a like-for-like basis.”
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