According to PYMNTS.com, during Albertsons Companies’ third-quarter fiscal 2025 earnings call, executives revealed key results from its AI initiatives. President and CFO Sharon McCollam noted year-over-year growth of 2.4% in identical sales and a 21% jump in digital sales. CEO Susan Morris emphasized the company is embedding AI for a “durable structural advantage,” not as a short-term lever. She specifically highlighted the “Ask AI” shopping assistant, launched across all its banner store apps in September, which is already delivering a 10% increase in basket size for users. The company also rolled out autonomous shopping assistants on its websites in December and is applying AI to merchandising, labor scheduling, and supply chain forecasting.
AI Hype Meets Grocery Aisles
Okay, a 10% lift in basket size is nothing to sneeze at. If that holds as adoption scales, it’s a huge win. But here’s the thing: we have to be a little skeptical about these early, cherry-picked metrics. The key phrase is “for those customers using it.” Who are those customers? Probably early adopters and tech enthusiasts who were already primed to spend more. The real test is what happens when your average, skeptical shopper tries to ask an AI for a recipe and gets a hallucinated ingredient list. The risk for any customer-facing AI, especially in something as nuanced as food, is that a few bad experiences can erode trust faster than the tech can build it.
Beyond The Shopping Cart
What’s more interesting, honestly, is Albertsons’ focus on the backend. Using AI for labor forecasting, supply chain optimization, and merchandising intelligence is where the real, durable savings and efficiencies are likely hiding. Morris talked about “freeing our people to focus on strategy and innovation,” which sounds great. But in the cutthroat, low-margin grocery business, “optimizing labor” often has another, less sunny connotation. If the AI is truly about improving customer service by having the right staff in the right place, that’s a win. If it’s just a path to cutting hours, that’s a different story that could backfire on the customer experience they’re trying to enhance.
The Long-Game Play
Morris is smart to frame this as a long-term structural play. Throwing an AI chatbot on your app is a tactic. Weaving AI into the core operational fabric of a massive, physical retail business is a transformation. The compounding returns she mentions could be real—better forecasts lead to less waste, better schedules lead to happier staff and customers, smarter merchandising leads to higher margins. But it’s a marathon, not a sprint. And these systems require immense amounts of clean, organized data to function properly. For a legacy company operating dozens of different banner stores, that data integration hurdle alone is a monster.
The Bottleneck Isn’t The Tech
So, what’s the biggest risk? I’d argue it’s organizational and cultural, not technological. You can deploy all the AI you want, but if the store managers don’t trust the labor schedule it spits out, or the merchants ignore its pricing recommendations, it’s all just a very expensive dashboard. The “intelligent automation” guiding decisions only works if the humans in the loop are trained to work with it, not against it. Albertsons seems to be making a serious, enterprise-wide bet. That 10% basket bump is a great headline. But the real proof will be in those same-store sales and margin figures a few years down the road, when the shiny new AI assistant isn’t so new anymore.
