Philly’s Gopuff is using Elon Musk’s AI chat bot to speed orders
As Gopuff looks to compete with AI-delivery rivals, the company says its new Grok Bot interface will aid deliveries in as little as 15 minutes.
Gopuff, the Philadelphia-based delivery service, has set up a digital order service it says should be able to deliver in as little as 15 minutes by using Grok Bot, the AI agent-powered chat service run by SpaceX Super Intelligence.
The partnership between Gopuff and the AI unit of Elon Musk’s SpaceX is designed to help the two match established rival delivery and AI combinations that have been hooking up to ease ordering hassle, avoid delays with out-of-stock items, and speed deliveries.
The new interface, Grok Bot’s first delivery partnership, can accelerate selection, purchase and delivery of Gopuff’s convenience-store and grocery offerings by cutting out the need for intermediate matching software and order-routing services, instead tagging products direct from inventories at local Gopuff garages.
“Customers can seamlessly browse thousands of everyday essentials” on the shelves at Gopuff, “build a customized order, choose a payment method, and check out without ever leaving the chat,” Gopuff said in a statement.
The partnership brings Gopuff and Grok into a busy competitive arena. According to Chain Store Age, an industry publication, the meal-delivery giants are already partnered with AI leaders.
Food service DoorDash is testing a similar feature with Google Gemini. Instacart and UberEats are working to speed orders using Anthropic Claude. Instacart also has set up a similar service with ChatGPT.
The new service is accessed via Grok Bot on X.com through the “Connect Apps” button or a ”Connect to Gopuff” demand in the bot’s chat.
After choosing (or signing up for) the Gopuff order option on the bot, users select products. The choices are what’s currently available at the local Gopuff garage, which the company says at any given time includes thousands of Gopuff-label and partner-branded items.
At the local Gopuff center, workers stack the order and drive it to the customer.
Gopuff says users reopening the bot, who don’t want to take the time to recompile a familiar order list, will be able to reference their own past orders in a short, general command such as “Send weekly groceries” or “My usual beer and cigarettes.” Or they could tell the system: “Grab football game drinks and snacks” or “I’m coughing; get me cold medicine and tissues.”
SpaceX AI services already power Gopuff’s Go, the personal shopping assistant Gopuff rolled out in June.
With Go, Grok’s chat and voice services are plugging into Gopuff’s neighborhood delivery garages, to create “a personal shopping assistant that knows what you want and delivers in minutes,” SpaceXSI (formerly SpaceXAI) said in a description posted to its website.
“The greatest friction left in commerce is not delivery or instantaneous access to the essentials customers need. It’s the moment before: the thinking, the deciding, the remembering,” Gopuff cofounder Yakir Gola said in a statement at the time.
