Buddy AI Shopping Assistant and Australian Agentic Commerce: Still Years from Routine Use

Australia's largest retailers are investing in autonomous AI agents that can shop for customers, but industry experts say the technology is expensive and unlikely to become routine for at least three years. For AI builders, the key takeaway is that agentic commerce in retail faces fundamental trust and logistics hurdles before it scales.

Australia's Big Retailers Bet on AI Shopping Agents

Wesfarmers (owner of Bunnings), Woolworths, and Coles reported combined profits of over $5 billion for the 2026 financial year, and all three flagged agentic commerce as a key investment area during their full-year results. Bunnings already deploys the Buddy AI shopping assistant on its website, built on Google Cloud's Gemini platform. Woolworths has its Olive digital shopping assistant and is beta-testing Smart Basket, which builds a basket from previous purchases but still requires human checkout. Coles has partnered with automation company Ocado for deliveries since 2019 and sees conversational shopping as a growth opportunity.

Online grocery orders are climbing fast: Coles online sales rose 26.4 percent to $5.6 billion (nearly 14 percent of total sales), while Woolworths online orders grew 18 percent to almost $11 billion. Retail analysts predict one in three products could be purchased online within a few years, driven in part by private-label brands that now account for about 36 percent of supermarket sales.

The Practical Barriers: Cost, Fresh Groceries, and Trust

Industry experts caution that autonomous AI shopping faces three major blockers. First, deployment costs are high-one analysis noted that Ocado's automated picking cost per item for British clients was 52 pence ($1.06) in 2024, and since online and in-store prices are the same, retailers may need to pass logistics costs to customers. Second, fresh groceries are particularly hard to automate because substitutions are personal: as one analyst put it, "Get one item wrong in a $200 basket and you've lost trust in the whole thing." Third, even the most advanced pilots (like Woolworths' Smart Basket) still place a human at checkout, meaning full agentic autonomy has not been deployed at any scale.

The technology is expected to first handle routine replenishment (toilet paper, cleaning goods) rather than fresh produce, which could eventually shrink store sizes and ranges as repeat purchases move online.

Data Privacy and Regulatory Risks Could Reshape Rollout

University of Sydney retail expert Lisa Asher warned that AI shopping agents essentially monetise customer shopping habits, calling for regulation to curb surveillance capitalism. The article also notes that moves toward facial scans in supermarkets, though presented as safety measures, could enable scope creep toward discriminatory pricing once installed. Privacy concerns may slow adoption or force retailers to redesign their data collection practices, especially in markets with strong consumer protections.

What Builders Should Watch

The shift toward agentic commerce creates opportunities for AI teams working on logistics optimization, natural language shopping interfaces, and private-label recommendation engines. But the timeline is long-at least three years before such tools become standard-and the technical challenges around substitution handling, trust, and cost per order remain unsolved at scale. Builders should treat current deployments (Buddy, Olive, Smart Basket) as beta tests with human oversight, not as production-ready autonomous agents.