Woolworths is preparing to remake its “Mandy” chatbot into what it’s calling an agentic loyalty assistant, a move that would push the retailer’s Everyday-branded customer tools well beyond basic chat support. Speaking at Google Cloud Summit Sydney, Woolworths’ AI customer experience lead Katharyn Moger said “Mandy will become your value companion,” signalling a much broader role for the assistant across loyalty, mobile and insurance experiences.
The shift follows Woolworths’ earlier AI overhaul of Olive, its shopping and support assistant. According to iTnews, Woolworths has already rebuilt Olive using Google Cloud’s Gemini Enterprise for Customer Experience, or GECX, moving it from what executives described as a deterministic chat and voice bot into a more agentic assistant in about six months. Google describes GECX as an agentic platform that spans the customer journey from product discovery to post-purchase support.
Woolworths Says Its Old Bot Approach Hit a Ceiling
One of the more telling parts of the presentation was Woolworths admitting that its previous setup had run out of room to grow. Moger said Olive had delivered strong results as a traditional bot, including handling more than 70 percent of contact centre interactions, but added that the company had “hit a ceiling” with deterministic AI and struggled to bring richer generative experiences to customers in a safe, reliable way.
That helps explain why Woolworths is now leaning into agentic technology. The company’s digital experiences head of technology, Ducas Francis, said the newer setup gives Olive capabilities like reasoning, personalisation, multi-step tasks and multimodality, while grounding the agent in Woolworths’ own retail APIs, recipes, nutritional data, stock levels and pricing. That grounding matters because it’s meant to reduce hallucinations and keep the assistant tied to real retail information rather than vague chatbot guesses.
Olive Is the Template for What Mandy Could Become
The article makes clear that Mandy is not the first step here. Olive is already being used as the blueprint. Woolworths says Olive’s upgraded capabilities include analysing photos of meals or fridge contents, suggesting recipes, building shopping plans and supporting customer-service tasks like refunds. iTnews reports that the new Olive was tested internally by Woolworths’ 200,000 staff for two months before being prepared for shoppers.
Francis also said the retailer wants the newer framework to push beyond its previous 80 percent containment target across roughly half a million conversations a month. In other words, this is not just about making the bot sound smarter. It’s about getting it to solve more customer problems without handing people off to a human quite so often.
Why the Loyalty Angle Matters
What makes Mandy especially interesting is the loyalty focus. Woolworths is not just trying to build a better support bot. It’s trying to build a more valuable everyday assistant around rewards, savings, personalised offers and shopping guidance. That’s a different kind of bet. It suggests the company sees agentic AI not only as a service tool, but as something that could sit closer to the customer’s day-to-day retail decisions.
That fits neatly with how Google has been pitching GECX more broadly. In Google’s launch materials, the platform is positioned as a way for retailers to move from simple conversations to more active problem-solving across shopping and customer service. Woolworths was named by Google among the businesses using the platform, and outside coverage earlier this year described the retailer as the first Australian retailer to adopt Google Cloud’s agentic CX technology.
The Bigger Retail AI Shift
The broader story here is that Australian retailers are starting to move past the first chatbot era. The old model was mostly about answering common questions. The newer model is about assistants that can understand intent, connect across systems, reason through multiple steps, and help people actually complete tasks. Woolworths’ comments suggest it sees this as the next phase of digital retail, not just a side experiment.
That doesn’t automatically mean the experience will be great. Agentic retail bots still have to prove they can be useful without becoming annoying, inaccurate or overly intrusive. But Woolworths’ public roadmap makes one thing clear: this isn’t just about support anymore. It’s about using AI to become a more active shopping and loyalty companion.
Why this matters for Australia
This matters because Woolworths isn’t a niche tech startup testing some experimental AI demo. It’s one of the country’s biggest retailers, and any shift it makes toward agentic assistants could put AI much more directly into everyday shopping for Australian customers.
It also suggests the next wave of retail AI in Australia may be less about answering FAQs and more about helping people compare value, plan meals, build lists, manage rewards and navigate customer service in a more personalised way. If that works, it could reshape what Australians start expecting from supermarket apps and loyalty programs.
The bigger takeaway is simple: Woolworths is trying to turn AI from a helpdesk feature into something much closer to an everyday retail companion.
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Source: iTnews | Google Cloud
