Do Woolworths shoppers want Google AI adding items to buy? We’ll soon find out

Woolworths has partnered with Google to enhance its Olive chatbot with agentic artificial intelligence, starting in Australia.
The revamped Olive will assist in planning meals, interpreting handwritten recipes, applying loyalty discounts, and suggesting items to add to customers’ online shopping baskets.
While Olive still won’t automatically complete purchases, it will increasingly make decisions on behalf of shoppers, shaping choices through curated outcomes.
This shift from browsing to accepting curated suggestions fundamentally changes the shopping process, nudging consumer behaviour and preferences without overt persuasion.
Data privacy remains a concern as grocery shopping data can reveal more personal information than brand preference, revealing family, health, and financial details which may be aggregated and used elsewhere.
As AI increasingly guides shopping decisions, the conversation should extend to consumer autonomy, transparency in recommendation generation, and ensuring limits on commercial influence over the system.
The integration of agent-based commerce needs closer scrutiny to prevent reconfiguration of consumer behaviour in ways difficult to detect or reverse.

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