Carrefour Grocery Shopping via ChatGPT | Fast Five Shorts

Car 4 has become the first major European retailer to offer grocery shopping directly through Chatchee PT. This was one of the headlines where I was specifically interested in getting your take on it today, Laura. They are launching the integration in France on March 26 and targeting the company's estimated 26 million Chatchee PT users. According to the retail insight network, French users can now interact with Chatchee PT to get recipe ideas, check product availability, build the shopping basket, and select delivery or clicking collect options, all without leaving the Chatchee PT interface before completing their purchase on Care4. The integration lives inside Chatchee PT's mobile app alongside other service partners like booking.com, for example, and customers can access it simply by searching for Car4 in the apps list of applications. Importantly, payment is like we talked about last week, everyone. Payment is completed on Car4's own website, meaning Car4 retains transaction data and the direct customer relationship, even while seating some control over what products the AI recommends. Laura, there are a lot of retailers, a lot of retailers debuting apps inside of Chatchee PT. We talked about it like I said with Walmart last week. Sephora also recently is doing something similar. What do you think of this strategy? And does the fact that Car4 is a traditional grocer change your thoughts on the approach at all? No, I mean, this is an area that, as you noted, I've been following really closely for a while for more than a year. It's sort of the idea of we were calling it a gentick shopping, but I'm not sure that it's increasingly seeming like we're sort of just thinking about it all at LLMs. The short answer is I feel like it's moving in the right direction, but the experience isn't right yet. So I don't know if you've used an app in Chatchee PT. I have not. So, you know, for these purposes, I played around with it. I used the target app. It did a pretty good job on the suggestion side. I was asking it for snacks for a soccer team, which I immediately need for my son's game this week. But there's too many steps. If you have to go in, you have to find the app. You have to connect it to your platform. And then you have to add target, like old school, Twitter style or something. So then it just defeats the purpose of being in Chatchee PT and using an answer engine, which is to make things easier and more efficient. And so the other question it brings up for me is exactly how consumers are using Chatchee PT or LLMs in their journey. To your point, it seems like they're not buying things there. As you discussed on the podcast, as Walmart has said, everybody, the shot, it's really just shopping. And then you start to split hairs to understand which tasks exactly are they trying to use it for? Find me a spring jacket. It's different than give me what's available at target. And I would just say that the sort of generous view is that it's too early. We don't really know how exactly that's happening. But we definitely know they don't want to check out there. It reminds me of when we were first talking about social commerce. And everybody was like, is this actually what people want to be doing on these apps? And I think we kind of have to ask ourselves that about the LLMs. But to your point, I think it also gets back to who owns which layer. Car for still wants to own the checkout, but to the LLMs own the discovery. What happens with retail ad buying? Are you buying an ad on Chatchee PT? Are you buying an ad on Car for? I'm sure this app thing is partially to keep things in a box. So that's the long way of saying what I initially said, which is I feel like we're onto something but the experience isn't right. You've known about car for and grocery shopping, I think is important because that is a more distinctive experience in terms of loyalty, in terms of your intent. That car for, give me ingredients for a weekend barbecue is different than Fimia Spring Jacket. So maybe you know that you're grocer, you're more apt to attach that app to your LLMs. But it still is this hiccup in the process that I'm always skeptical about whether consumers are going to do and want to do. I'm glad you brought up that point because the grocery thing is really interesting to me. And to hear you talk about it, I think it's really important because in context Walmart, when they initially said they were doing the Chatchee PT integration, they kept grocery off the table from what I remember. And I don't know if that's still the case given their recent announcement, but that was very overtly sex. I remember doing on the part very overtly said that they were not going to include grocery. I think grocery does behave differently. I 100% agree with you and producer Ellis said the same thing in terms of an app experience. Like if I'm just going to have an app experience, why don't I just go the app and have great LLMs inside the app of the grocer or the retailer that I'm doing things. And the thing that I worry about grocery, so then I say like, okay, well, what if it's grocery? It's grocery different. I have a strong generally you have a strong bond already with your grocer because you're going there each and every week for the most part. Right. And that's why I keep coming back to his, no, it doesn't. Because if I have good LLMs search on my own properties, that's a big, you know, that's a big thing here. That's a big caveat. Like why do I need this? And then, you know, especially when it's already on my phone anyway, like why, if you're already on the go, if I'm going to go tell me what, tell me car four or what I should, you know, plan for my barbecue this weekend. Why would I do that on the LLM versus in the app itself? So it doesn't make sense. And then the other thing I just wonder too is when I think about agente commerce in the long run, the more grocery data these guys have, the more susceptible the groceries are to getting disintermediated with technology and price comparison and all those types of things. So net net, I don't think I would be the first penguin in the water on this if I was car four. But I don't know what do you think? Am I over it? Over it? Yeah, I don't know. I think the point about agente commerce is where it becomes more interesting and like hypothetical at this point because we don't have, we don't have agente commerce yet. I think you're absolutely right that I am much more likely to open my Walmart target app and expect to have a better search experience within that as a consumer right now. And why isn't the LLM just there? I don't, you know, I'm already having issues when I go and ask chat GPT shopping questions and I know that it's not pulling Amazon results. And I'm like, well, I'm not getting the whole world. So now I got to go to Amazon anyway, which of course that's a good point too. That's what they want. Yep. But if we get into an agenteic world, I think something that I've always felt that is if we get into the world where you really are having an agent shop for you, it's going to be too much to have an agent for every retailer. We're going to have the Google agent or the OpenAI agent or some other big tech agent, Apple agent that sees your whole world and goes out and does that shopping for you. So in that world, if Walmart has a presence already in chat GPT or whatever LLM it is, probably check GPT, maybe that gives it a foothold for this future agenteic, truly autonomous world. And it's just going to why would you have a roofless and a sparky doing these things if you just are like just find me toothpaste at the lowest price. But that interacts with loyalty then, what's going to happen. So yeah, but by the same token, you're putting the Amazon strategy of buy for me in a totally different light as well. Yeah. That positioning a lot stronger too. So oh man, we're going to have to have you back and we're going to have to keep talking about this one because it changes every day. It's just so interesting, but it's important when you think about the long term implications of some of these decisions right now. Yes. And how thought out are they and how much do you need to make that move right this second? Yeah. Yeah, strategically I find it amazing or fascinating that you have car for and Walmart as two of the early movers because Walmart historically has not been a first mover. And so what does that mean? Does that mean that they feel it's really important to be first? Have they completely changed? They're play, you know, now they're one of our tech first movers. You know, these are other other discussion questions. So it's significant, I think. Wow. Really, really great stuff, Laura.