ShopriteX, the innovation arm of the Shoprite Group, has launched Pixie, an AI-powered shopping assistant inside the Sixty60 app — starting with Xtra Savings Plus members.
Pixie is a personalised recommendation engine that learns from a shopper’s purchase history, restocking patterns and preferences, and surfaces products it thinks they are likely to need.
It comes with a new “Smart Basket” interface that lets users swipe through product cards, Tinder-style — swipe up to dismiss, swipe down to add. The idea is to cut the time customers spend scrolling through the Sixty60 catalogue looking for the same bread and milk they bought last week.
Personalised deals and offers, drawn from the group’s Xtra Savings rewards programme, are baked into the experience. ShopriteX said in a statement on Thursday that the personalisation engine is built on a foundation of privacy, and does not share individual customer data.
“Shopping used to be something you did. But now, it’s something Pixie, your personalised shopping assistant, handles for you,” said Neil Schreuder, chief strategy and innovation officer for the Shoprite Group, in the statement. That might be putting it a touch strongly for an app that currently suggests you might want to reorder the milk — but the direction of travel is clear.
Road map
The more ambitious features are flagged as road map items rather than launch capabilities. ShopriteX said future iterations of Pixie will include conversational interaction, automatic reordering of household essentials, and meal planning based on a customer’s budget or what is already in their pantry. None of that is in the beta, which is available immediately.
Read: Sixty60 notches up R11.9-billion in sales in six months
Recommendation engines of this kind are standard in grocery apps globally — Instacart, Tesco and Amazon Fresh have run variations on the theme for years — so Pixie is less a breakthrough than ShopriteX catching its flagship app up to international peers.
Shoprite promotional video about Pixie on Sixty60
What is more interesting is that it was built entirely in-house by a ShopriteX team of product designers, data scientists, machine-learning engineers and software developers using Xtra Savings data as the training foundation.
Pixie begins rolling out in beta to Xtra Savings Plus members immediately, with broader availability to follow. — (c) 2026 NewsCentral Media
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