Customers using ChatGPT’s new agent to complete their online shopping may run into technical difficulties with two of the UK’s ‘big four’ supermarkets, Retail Week has found.
On a trial of the new agent service on ChatGPT’s Plus membership, which promises to do users’ online shopping orders for them, only Sainsbury’s and Morrisons allowed AI to complete the shop.
When OpenAI launched the agent for ChatGPT, the tech firm said it could complete “complex online tasks” on behalf of users, including placing orders with online grocery stores while following meal plans or other requests.
As an example, OpenAI said shoppers could ask the ChatGPT agent to “plan and buy ingredients to make a Japanese breakfast for four” and the agent would navigate websites, filter the results, add them to baskets and prompt users when they’re required to sign in to their online shopping accounts to check out.
Despite multiple attempts, both Asda and Tesco blocked the agent from creating a shopping basket, with ChatGPT failing both retailers’ authentication systems – which check if the online grocery user is human and detect suspicious behaviour when logging in.
Asda’s Cloudflare security verification system failed at the log-in stage, preventing users from using the AI agent for their shop, while Tesco showed an intermittent fault, sending users to an “Oops…it looks like something is not right” page following log-in attempts across multiple accounts.
OpenAI told Retail Week that some retailer websites are blocking the ChatGPT agent because their systems enforced automated blocking.
The firm said it offers an “allowlist” process, verified with IT system management companies Cloudflare, Vercel, and Human, which would allow the agent to browse the sites securely.
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