We ran out of milk early this week.
Now, you probably wonder, how in the world did this happen? Don’t you know that you have to order enough milk each Saturday to make it a week? The answers: we’re not sure, and yes, we should know better.
But life happens and we ran out early, so I thought, I wonder if Claude, Anthropic’s AI assistant, can make this easier? And as you’ve probably surmised, the answer is yes.
I spun up Claude and gave it simple instructions: a list of seven items and directions to buy what we’ve bought before. I connected my browser with the Claude in Chrome extension and watched it shop.
Claude went straight to Walmart’s My Items page, read our order history, and filled the cart in a couple of minutes. Where it had to guess (two sizes of pepperoni), it asked me. Then it stopped short of checkout like I’d asked. (Yes, I was a bit nervous that Claude would go off the rails and buy more than we actually needed. It didn’t.)
I had tried using Claude to prep an order before, but it didn’t know what items we liked to eat. So I think that’s the interesting improvement here: by prioritizing previous order history, Claude had enough information to make the right selections for us.
How to have Claude build your Walmart order
- Install Claude in Chrome and sign in to Walmart yourself first. (Claude won’t type your password, and you wouldn’t want it to.)
- Give it your list. Short and messy is fine — “milk, eggs, cheese” works.
- Point it at your order history so it buys what you usually buy instead of guessing brands and sizes. Again, this is the most helpful improvement.
- Tell it to ask when it’s unsure. Two sizes of pepperoni? You want that question.
- Tell it to stop before checkout. Then you review the cart and hit the button.
Here’s a sample prompt you can use:
Add these to my Walmart cart: milk, eggs, shredded cheese, bread, bananas, pepperoni, coffee. Use my My Items page to pick the same brand and size we’ve bought before. If there’s more than one match, ask me. Don’t check out — stop when the cart is ready so I can review it.
AI assistants for the rest of us
This is another example of what I think of as the democratization of assistants because of AI. A former coworker once told me about a job she held as an executive assistant in New York City. Dry cleaning pickup, birthday party planning, travel arrangements and more were all part of her work. I remember hearing these stories and thinking, wow, what a life to have someone do this!
For the first time, I see real opportunities for AI tools to do this for the rest of us. Instead of typing a list, perhaps next time I’ll use voice. It’s not Rosie the Robot, but it is helpful for busy parents.