Carrefour Belgium is trying to move part of the purchasing journey directly into ChatGPT. The retailer, together with Mealz.ai, has launched an assistant that allows customers to build shopping lists, check product availability, and prepare a cart without leaving the conversation.
The service is still in the prototype phase, but its functionality is already fairly well established. Users activate the assistant within ChatGPT, call Carrefour Belgium, and can ask, for example, to organize a weekly menu or a shopping list consistent with specific dietary needs.
The system takes into account preferences such as vegetarian or gluten-free diets and can save them for future use. Once the menu is defined, it suggests available products and creates a shopping cart with prices.
The transaction, however, isn't completed within ChatGPT. To complete the purchase, the customer is directed to the Carrefour website, where they can choose between pickup via Carrefour Drive or home delivery via Carrefour Delivery.
For delivery, there's still a minimum order of €60, with preparation and delivery costs varying depending on the order. The assistant also automatically links your Bonus Card, allowing you to apply any promotions and loyalty benefits you've already activated.
The most interesting development concerns the role Carrefour assigns to artificial intelligence in the purchasing process. Until now, many retailers have used these tools primarily behind the scenes, for forecasting, reordering, or waste reduction. Here, AI is entering the shopping cart process at the point of selection and composition.
Carrefour Belgium already uses artificial intelligence for predictive orders, managing products nearing their expiration dates, and in its automated BuyBye stores. With this new assistant, it adds a customer-facing application.
The group claims to be the first retailer in Belgium to integrate directly with ChatGPT and plans to update the service in the coming weeks based on feedback received.
The test will be to understand how willing consumers are to delegate a concrete portion of their weekly shopping to the assistant and, above all, whether the conversation can be transformed into actual orders without increasing friction in the final step to the retailer's website.
