Food industry stakeholders see agent-based artificial intelligence (AI) as a powerful tool to expand market share and drive service improvements. Following in the footsteps of Walmart’s watershed announcement, Instacart is now incorporating these technologies into both its consumer-facing and customer-facing processes.
Agentic AI has become a top buzzword in food technology. Even Uber executive Susan Anderson said at industry event Grocery Shop 2025 that the company’s third-party delivery platform is considering agent features to see what features might help customers fill their baskets for delivery or pickup.
But what is it?
It is a tool that can make decisions and perform tasks with little or no human intervention. It differs from generative AI services such as ChatGPT in that it can autonomously control a broader range of processes and handle more complex questions.
Instacart’s recent announcements introduced agent applications in commerce activities by leveraging digital agents to help partner retailers target customers, while also unveiling tools that work on a deeper level with AI tools to analyze and perform backend analytics to improve the customer experience, increase efficiency, and make informed decisions.
If these innovations can deliver on these promises, their impact will be transformative.
“These new AI solutions are the next chapter in our enterprise story, enabling retailers to turn generative and agent AI into a true competitive advantage,” Instacart CEO Chris Rogers said in a statement.
From Gen to A(gen)tic
In a recent press release about its partnership with Open.ai to build AI-first shopping experiences, Walmart discussed the potential of agent technology to move AI applications from reactive tools to proactive solutions. These tools can learn and predict the needs of your target users and better serve your customers.
At the beginning of this year, walmart announced Sparky as part of its announcement to bring four “super agents” to market to support shoppers, employees, suppliers, and sellers. Sparky is currently live on the website, allowing consumers to ask complex questions during their online shopping journey, while three other agents support business functions.
While many industry players question the day-one effectiveness of the product, business leaders in household goods, retail, and foodservice are investing in how these tools can be applied to their businesses, and other companies, such as PepsiCo, are exploring ways to optimize their portfolios to appear in these conversations.
The foundations of agent AI’s advantage are already here, and the next stage of growth will be leveraging the predictive capabilities of these services.
In the backend, reports from gartner It is estimated that 50% of supply chain management solutions will use autonomous agents to perform decisions by 2030.
Even more impressive is the IBM We found that 70% of supply chain business executives say that by 2026, AI agents will enable employees to dig deeper into analytics to support real-time analysis and optimization. The majority of this autonomous support is expected to come from procurement and dynamic procurement applications. Additionally, 62% say these solutions help speed up decision-making and communication.
Agent AI also supports front-end results. The impact of Shopify’s agent AI on recent orders spiked 11x conference call.
During the conference call, President Harley Finkelstein noted that Shopify’s Sidekick assistant has been successful in engaging with users, facilitating nearly 100 million conversations across 750,000 partner stores in the third quarter alone.
This is the power of agent AI and why the F&B industry is heavily invested in its success.
The future of litigation and AI
Agent functionality can have a dark side, as evidenced by Amazon’s recent legal battle with software company Perplexity AI.
The e-commerce giant reportedly claimed in its lawsuit that Perplexity’s agent functionality covertly accessed customer accounts and mimicked human activity. Reuters. Perplexity countered that Amazon was using its market power to increase competition and asserted that it was not acting legally.
This case illustrates how the increasing use of AI agents to perform tasks on behalf of customers can spark heated debates between parties with conflicting interests. On the other hand, these agents have access to sensitive consumer data to perform these tasks. Additionally, e-commerce companies are likely to retaliate as consumers are freed from manipulating advertising and other features on web pages, threatening their market share.
The conversation around agent AI has also recently included talk about layoffs scheduled for October. This is the highest reported influx of layoffs in the past 20 years. AI is cited as the reason for these decisions, but that raises questions. As agent AI becomes more powerful, what will prevent it from replacing higher-level actors?
Additionally, there are also many technical challenges that arise from maintaining consistency between human outputs when much of the analysis is done autonomously.
“Focused agent AI can gain insights faster than humans, but there is a lot of work to do to make that possible,” Daniel Sporkin, senior vice president of media and marketing services at Ferrero, said at a recent industry event.
In this context, Sporkin pointed out that other practices such as clean and standardized data are becoming even more important.
For now, the interplay between human control and independent analysis remains the cornerstone of the technology.
food for thought leadership
Sponsor of this episode: Performance Foodservice
How important is it for food distributors to build a foodservice brand, especially since it may not be seen or recognized by consumers? Mike Seidel Vice President of Procurement Performance Food Service Corporateshares how the company is thinking about developing its existing foodservice brands, including: rome and contigoand how they contributed to the creation of the modern Mediterranean concept. Zebek.
