How New Zealand grocery startup Teddy uses ChatGPT to drive big business results

Artificial intelligence is propelling New Zealand grocery startups to new heights, allowing them to compete with industry giants and saving hundreds of thousands of staff.

Teddy co-founder Ricki Taiaroa said it is used by delivery companies.
Chatbot ChatGPT for online grocery recommendations, code execution, and warehouse operations.

Taiaroa said local start-ups have an “opportunity to establish a business with fewer resources than before.”

“This will allow us to compete more effectively,” he said.

“The name of the game is building a competitive business. [a] Year after year we are able to compete with larger companies and become an established brand. [ChatGPT] Enable sustainable growth. ”

He said the technology will allow small teams to work on the same low budgets as food retail heavy hitters.

Artificial intelligence has cut costs across the board by reducing the number of staff needed.

“The coding assistant tool we use is Copilot, which costs $10/month. ChatGPT charges hundreds of dollars, so it’s very affordable.”

He said he works for one to two developers on Copilot alone.

“You’re doing a lot of code. It’s a different way of programming, but it makes you more productive. It’s very powerful,” Taiaroa said.

The co-founder said that product recommendations are Teddy’s main focus when using ChatGPT.

“In my previous role, buying an off-the-shelf recommendation engine would cost you hundreds of thousands of dollars, probably not more than half a million dollars,” he added.

“With a few text prompts and ChatGPT, I could build it for a few hundred bucks.”

He said the company’s convenience-based business model means it’s essential to anticipate customer needs.

“Before technologies like GPT, we had to build machine learning models based on historical sales data. It will be difficult.”

Taiaroa says the technology is “difficult to match” compared to manual software development.

He said the team is currently looking into adding automated product tagging to the AI ​​basket.

“As we bring new products into the warehouse, we will be able to tag and classify the products in the warehouse,” he said, further saving warehouse operations.

Chief Technology Officer Dion Yiw said that while ChatGPT offers business insights into consumer behavior, the technology is “already very powerful” after launching just a few months ago. I was.

“I think we will soon have this kind of software agent that can understand every part of the business: the business cycle, the customers, all the products,” says Yiw.

Taiaroa added: Combining all of these, you can replicate many of the capabilities of large teams. ”

Frances Valintine, founder and chair of Mind Lab and tech Future’s Lab, says AI has the potential to change the way developers work. “Functions that automate highly repetitive tasks are easy to write using AI,” she says. “This reduces project time and also eliminates human error.”

She also said AI can quickly track quality assurance testing, debugging, and user testing for enterprises.

“Generative AI is ideally suited for recommending code in the same way that Grammarly helps people write.”

She said, “Recommendations are very likely to help, they are quick, and they are often better than what was there in the first place, but engineers should, at least for the time being, avoid AI-generated code. It needs to be verified and monitored.”

When asked whether AI would curb the need to hire developers, Valentine said junior or entry-level developers would be challenged and often displaced by AI.

“Over time, further advances in AI will provide increasingly effective solutions for the coding aspect of software development.”

But she added that there is still “a lot of time” before generative AI can solve problems and create solutions in the same way senior software engineers do.

“There are improvements and significant new entrants emerging every week in the AI ​​space, so I don’t want to put a time frame on this.”

She said the risk of AI adoption being delayed is a disadvantage for companies that are reluctant to use the technology.

“There are also many benefits to letting AI take on tasks for which there is a shortage of suitable local talent. Few companies can afford to employ a large number of staff.”

Marilyn Giroux, senior marketing lecturer at the University of Auckland, said:

But she said companies should be careful about using AI in marketing.

“We need to investigate how humans respond to AI. Recent research suggests that individuals respond to humans differently than AI.”

Her research shows that consumers are more likely than humans to behave unethically when dealing with artificial intelligence.

“We ascribe different intentions to AI, such as responsibility, but also different moral intentions and behaviors when working with AI,” said Giroux.

She said ChatGPT’s current capabilities cannot replace the human factor in marketing.

“Companies need to validate their work, research and ideas, as misinformation and bias can lead to misinformation.”

She said companies need human experts with more knowledge of their business to stay successful and relevant to their audiences.