Woolworths is turning Olive, its long-running customer-service chatbot, into an AI agent that plans your meals, builds your basket and hunts for cheaper swaps. The upgrade runs on Google Cloud's Gemini, and it starts reaching shoppers in July.
Woolworths officially announced the new Olive on 29 June, and soft-launched the service at Google Cloud's Sydney summit the week before, where the supermarket was held up as one of the headline customers for agentic AI in Australian retail.
The pitch is simple, and aimed squarely at the cost-of-living-weary household: let the AI do the boring, repetitive parts of the weekly shop. The interesting part is how much control Woolworths is willing to hand over, and how much it's deliberately keeping back.
Woolworths has a TikTok account where it has one video about Olive, but here’s the publicly available Channel 7 report about Olive on its YouTube page – the article continues below, please read on!
What's actually new
The upgraded Olive moves from answering questions to doing the work. It can build an entire weekly meal plan around a customer's preferences, then act as a personal shopper for everything from pantry staples to a kid's birthday party.
On budget, Olive can surface specials and suggest "smart swaps", nudging shoppers toward cheaper alternatives on the same list. Given that's tied to Everyday Rewards, it doubles as a loyalty play as much as a shopping one.
The Woolworths app gets 2 new features alongside it. Snap & Shop lets you photograph a handwritten list or a recipe torn from a magazine and turns it into a shopping list. Smart Baskets predicts your recurring weekly items and suggests "smart additions" based on past habits.
All of it, Woolworths says, rolls out to customers using the Woolworths app in pick-up and delivery mode through July, powered by Google Cloud's Gemini Enterprise for Customer Experience.
From a deterministic bot to an agent
Olive isn't new. It's been Woolworths' digital customer-service helper for years, fielding the routine stuff: refunds, order tracking, store hours, where's-my-delivery.
What's changed is the engine. Google Cloud's Gemini Enterprise for Customer Experience took Olive from what Woolworths describes as a "deterministic chat and voice bot" to an agentic assistant in around 6 months, and Woolworths reckons it's the first Australian supermarket to let an AI actively build grocery orders rather than just answer questions.
It's also multimodal, which is where it gets clever. Snap a photo of a handwritten recipe and Olive can read it, identify the ingredients, apply any eligible rewards discounts and drop the products straight into your basket. That's the same photo-to-cart trick Wesfarmers' Bunnings showed off with its Buddy assistant, built on the same Google platform, so this is clearly a playbook Google Cloud is running across Australian retail.
Google Cloud vice president for Australia and New Zealand Paul Migliorini leaned into that reasoning ability. "With Gemini Enterprise for Customer Experience, Woolworths is creating an agentic commerce journey that is intuitive and personalised," he said. "For Olive, this means it can perform complex, multi-step reasoning like balancing a shopper's preferences and meal planning."
Woolworths first put the agentic Olive in front of its own staff, about 200,000 of them, before letting it loose on shoppers. On a brand-facing bot, that caution is well earned.
Helper, not a decider
The line Woolworths keeps repeating is about who's in charge, and it's the most important part of the announcement.
"We've designed the new Olive to make sure technology remains a helper and not a decider," said Woolworths Group managing director of eComX and chief digital and analytics officer Amitabh Mall. "While Olive can do the heavy lifting to suggest products and build a basket, customers will remain in complete control, reviewing and approving all items before checkout."
Woolworths says it has put guardrails around Olive in line with its existing safety, product and privacy requirements. Mall framed the upside in plain terms: "Our customers are telling us they want grocery shopping to be faster and more intuitive, so we are leaning into that feedback." He called it "a massive step forward that will change how people shop with us."
There's good reason for the careful language. Earlier in 2026, Woolworths had to rein Olive in after the bot wandered off script in customer chats, including a now-infamous ramble about its "mother". An agent that can add 40 items to your trolley is a lot more useful than one that just answers questions, and a lot more exposed when it gets something wrong. Keeping a human's finger on the checkout button is both good design and good risk management.
The Colesworth AI proxy war
Step back and this is also a contest between Google and Microsoft, fought through the supermarket duopoly.
Woolworths has thrown in with Google Cloud and Gemini. Coles, meanwhile, signed a 5-year strategic partnership with Microsoft, running its AI on Azure and Azure OpenAI. Coles has rolled out a generative AI assistant called mycoles to its 115,000 staff, answering more than 15,000 questions a month, and it's been testing agentic AI on internal jobs like staff leave bookings.
The difference in emphasis is telling. Coles' generative AI work so far has skewed internal, helping team members with rosters, leave and store operations. Woolworths is pointing Olive straight at the customer and the basket. Both approaches are defensible, but they're different bets on where agentic AI pays off first in grocery.
Google isn't only backing Woolworths, either. It has Bunnings on the same customer-experience platform, and US grocery giant Kroger using it overseas, so Woolworths is one node in a growing retail roster Google can point to when it sells the next supermarket.
What it means
The weekly grocery shop is about the most habitual, high-frequency task in most people's lives, which makes it close to the ideal testbed for agentic AI. If a software agent can reliably save a household time and money every single week, that's a stickier hook than almost anything else retailers have tried.
The catch is trust, and it cuts both ways. Shoppers have to trust Olive enough to let it build the basket, and Woolworths has to trust Olive enough to put it in front of millions of customers without another "mother" moment. The "helper, not a decider" framing is Woolworths threading that needle: enough autonomy to be genuinely useful, enough human oversight to stay safe and on-brand.
There's a bigger shift underneath it too. As more people start their shopping inside AI assistants rather than on a retailer's website, the supermarkets that show up natively in those conversations win the basket. Olive going agentic is Woolworths making sure it's in the room when that happens.
July will tell us whether shoppers actually hand over the trolley. If they do, expect Coles to answer quickly, and expect the real fight in Australian grocery to be as much about whose AI you trust as whose specials are cheaper.
