Swedish retailer Coop Sweden has chosen UK artificial intelligence (AI) lab EBI AI to build a grocery retail AI assistant available to shoppers via apps, web or Google Assistant.

The plan is to launch the digital personal assistant, called Cooper, this spring. The digital assistant will provide users with a concierge for their daily needs. Initially Cooper will understand each customer’s dietary requirements, suggest recipes, and provide nutritional and loyalty scheme information. In the future, the Cooper AI will handle all aspects of customer engagement.

It will let shoppers scan products in the store so Cooper can help them in-store and at home. By combining the digital and in-store journeys, customer experience should be enhanced and life made easier for shoppers.

“Coop wants to build a level of customer experience that is unparalleled in the Swedish retail marketplace,” said Amer Mohammed, chief digital officer at Coop Sweden. “The work that EBI AI is doing for us gives us a tool to build strong relationships with our customers and support them with an important part of their daily life. I look forward to driving this development that will change both how we shop and how we eat.”

EBI AI is using its data engineering expertise, Lobster AI communications platform and Adobe Experience Cloud to provide the technology.

“This new partnership with Coop in Sweden means that EBI.AI is at the forefront of AI innovation in property, travel, insurance and now retail and grocery industries,” said Matthew Doel, managing director of EBI AI. “It is a privilege to work with Coop in Sweden as the company is serious about delivering extraordinary customer experience and an excellent example for others to follow.”

Coop is one of Sweden’s largest grocery chains with 817 stores and is owned by the Swedish Cooperative Union (KF). Coop has had an online shop since 2008, which today reaches over 60 per cent of Swedish households with home deliveries and offers meal plans that can be picked up in all Coop stores.

Established by EBI in 2014, Warwick-headquartered EBI AI is one the most advanced UK labs to explore the potential of artificial intelligence for customer communication.

EBI was one of the first IBM Watson ecosystems partners and EBI AI’s core platform was originally based on IBM Watson. This has evolved over five years and EBI AI now selects the best AI and cloud services available from IBM, Amazon, Microsoft and others, combined with bespoke AI models to deliver its communication platform.