OpenAI broadens Albertsons AI partnership around Safeway shopping

OpenAI expanded its partnership with Albertsons Companies on October 1, extending the grocer’s use of ChatGPT Enterprise and the OpenAI API across employee workflows, retail applications and customer shopping.

The customer-facing piece is a Safeway shopping service in ChatGPT. Shoppers can start with a recipe, photo, digital list or natural-language request, find relevant products and savings, and build or edit a cart. Once the cart is ready, ChatGPT directs them to Safeway’s platform to complete checkout. Although OpenAI describes the journey once as happening ‘all in ChatGPT,’ its detailed explanation and Albertsons’ product instructions put final checkout on Safeway.

The Safeway integration itself is not new. Albertsons announced the plugin as available on August 5, making the October 1 development an expansion of the companies’ broader work rather than the service’s initial launch.

Within Albertsons, OpenAI said selected retail-technology and business teams are using ChatGPT Enterprise and other OpenAI-powered applications. The grocer is also using the OpenAI API for customer experiences, recommendations and promotional insights. That deployment is separate from OpenAI’s own Data agent for enterprise analytics in ChatGPT Work. OpenAI said the partnership is intended to streamline workflows and produce explainable, data-driven recommendations. The companies did not say how many employees use the tools or provide measured results for productivity, recommendation quality or sales.

OpenAI said Albertsons operates more than 2,200 stores serving over 36 million customers each week. Albertsons separately said it operated 2,240 stores as of June 20, 2026. Neither company disclosed the partnership’s commercial terms, model choices, data-retention arrangements or technical architecture.

OpenAI said the Safeway experience is planned to expand to Albertsons, Vons, Jewel-Osco, Shaw’s, ACME and Tom Thumb, but it did not provide dates or a rollout sequence.