The Consumer Advantage of Technology
Dec 8, 2025
Access + Intelligence
At its core, technology has always served consumers in two fundamental ways:
Access — removing friction, increasing convenience, and making products and services easier to reach.
Intelligence — improving decisions and outcomes through better insight, personalization, and automation.
What's different today, accelerated by AI, is that both forces are evolving at unprecedented speed. Barriers to access are collapsing, while the intelligence layer is becoming exponentially more capable. Together, these forces are reconstructing consumer expectations and creating momentum unmatched by any prior technology cycle.
Applying These Themes to Grocery
Viewed through the lens of access and intelligence, the future of grocery becomes clear:
Access → Make it easier to buy
The first phase of digital transformation focused on removing friction: delivery, curbside pickup, rapid fulfillment, and digital carts. These innovations solved the “access” problem by making groceries available anytime, anywhere… but that was only the first half of the game.
Intelligence → Automate the decisions
The second half is far more transformative. By leveraging data, purchase history, and user preferences, we can begin automating the cognitive load of grocery shopping. Instead of asking consumers to rebuild their carts every week, we can infer needs, predict replenishment cycles, and anticipate preferences before the consumer expresses them.
This is where AI excels—turning behavioral patterns into smart recommendations, auto-replenishment, dynamic meal planning, and personalized carts that proactively support the shopper.
Why We Believe Chrome Extensions Play an Important Role in Agentic Commerce
As AI-driven shopping evolves from “assistive” to truly agentic, Chrome extensions provide a uniquely powerful surface. They combine user control, cross-site intelligence, and retailer alignment to accelerate both access and intelligence across the commerce experience.
User-controlled, permissioned intelligence
Chrome extensions operate directly within the shopper’s natural browsing flow. This enables fully permissioned, privacy-forward intelligence—aggregating purchase history across retailers, enabling true data portability, and applying these insights everywhere a consumer shops.
AAA: The Evolution of Agentic Commerce via Extensions
Assist: Enhance the retailer environment
Extensions bring agentic commerce directly into retailer sites, empowering shoppers to make confident decisions without ever leaving the retailer’s environment. They increase transparency and build trust—all while keeping the shopper engaged on the retailer’s property.
Advise: Real-time intelligence and decision support
Next, extensions begin powering intelligent, on-site automation. They surface context-aware insights in real time—substitutions, product optimizations, dietary alignment, recurring needs—enabling shoppers to make confident decisions with minimal effort.
Automate: Full agentic shopping
Ultimately, extensions enable a fully agentic layer: AI that proactively manages lists, selects products using purchase history and buying preferences, and automatically builds carts inside retailer sites. It can optimize carts, automate replenishment cycles, and drive smoother paths to purchase. Retailers benefit from higher conversion, stickier customers, and more satisfied shoppers.
