Carrefour Belgium Brings Grocery Shopping Into ChatGPT

Carrefour Belgium is bringing grocery shopping directly into ChatGPT with a new AI-powered shopping assistant developed together with Mealz.ai.

Launched on August 25, the prototype allows customers to create shopping lists, check product availability, and prepare an order through a conversation with the Carrefour Belgium assistant in ChatGPT. Carrefour says it is the first retailer in Belgium to offer this type of shopping experience through the platform.

The development is another example of how generative AI is beginning to move beyond answering shopping questions toward actively participating in product discovery and purchase decisions.

From a Prompt to a Shopping Basket

Instead of searching Carrefour’s website product by product, customers can describe what they need in a conversational way.

For example, a family of four could ask the assistant to prepare a weekly menu while specifying that one person is vegetarian and another has a gluten intolerance. The assistant can then suggest a complete basket and display prices. Customers can modify the proposed list before being redirected to Carrefour’s website to confirm their shopping cart.

The assistant can also remember preferences and intolerances for future conversations. Carrefour’s Bonus Card is automatically connected, allowing relevant promotions and benefits to be included.

Once the basket is confirmed, shoppers can choose between collection via Carrefour Drive and home delivery via Carrefour Delivery.

The launch comes as AI adoption continues to grow in Belgium. Carrefour cites research indicating that 42% of Belgians aged 16 to 74 were already using tools such as ChatGPT by the end of 2025, compared with a European average of 32.7%.

Shopping Is Moving Beyond the Traditional Search Bar

The interesting part of Carrefour’s experiment is not simply that a retailer has added another AI chatbot.

It changes how a customer can interact with an e-commerce catalog.

Traditional online grocery shopping usually begins with a search query, category page, or promotion. A conversational assistant can begin instead with an intention: “Plan dinners for four people this week,” “Find gluten-free alternatives,” or “Help me prepare a vegetarian shopping list.”

The AI then has to translate that intention into specific products.

That creates a different kind of product discovery environment. Instead of customers manually filtering an assortment, the assistant increasingly performs part of the filtering and comparison for them.

For retailers, visibility may therefore depend not only on how products appear on category and search-result pages but also on whether AI systems can correctly determine whether a particular product matches a customer’s request.

AI Shopping Depends on Understanding the Product

This is where product data becomes particularly important.

Consider Carrefour’s example involving vegetarian and gluten-free requirements. For an AI assistant to reliably recommend suitable products, it needs access to accurate information about ingredients, dietary characteristics, product categories, and other relevant attributes.

The same principle applies beyond grocery retail. A product title and short marketing description alone may not provide enough information.

Structured attributes, standardized specifications, identifiers, descriptions, and other product content give AI systems a clearer representation of what a product is and how it differs from alternatives.

This is directly relevant to Icecat’s role in the e-commerce ecosystem. By structuring and standardizing product information, Icecat helps make catalogs easier to interpret and reuse across ecommerce channels. As AI assistants become another interface through which consumers discover products, machine-readable product information becomes useful not only for retailers and marketplaces but also for the systems that navigate those catalogs on shoppers’ behalf.

Carrefour Continues Its AI Experimentation

The ChatGPT assistant is not Carrefour Belgium’s first experiment with artificial intelligence.

The retailer already operates several AI-powered BuyBye stores in Belgium and uses AI in areas such as ordering and managing products approaching their expiration dates. In the first half of 2026, Carrefour Belgium also reported that its e-commerce activity grew 21%.

The new assistant brings AI closer to the customer-facing side of that strategy.

Carrefour says the application will continue to be developed, with additional features expected in the weeks following the launch.

Preparing Product Catalogs for Conversational Commerce

Carrefour’s experiment offers a useful glimpse into how e-commerce interfaces may evolve.

Consumers are unlikely to abandon websites, apps, or search bars overnight. But conversational assistants add another route into the product catalog, particularly when shoppers have complex requirements that are easier to explain in natural language than through multiple filters.

That creates a new consideration for brands and retailers: product information increasingly needs to work for both people and machines.