Descriptions:
Bloomberg Technology sits down with GoPuff co-CEO Raphael El-Erian to discuss the company’s decision to build its new AI-powered shopping assistant, called “Go,” on xAI’s Grok models rather than platforms from OpenAI or Anthropic. The interview is one of the first public case studies of a major consumer brand choosing xAI for an enterprise deployment after a competitive evaluation.
El-Erian explains that GoPuff spent ten to eleven months co-developing Go with xAI, creating a fully integrated experience that includes voice-based shopping, conversational cart building, and TikTok-style personalized product discovery. The decision to go with xAI came down to three factors: technical performance in voice and image generation, willingness to embed xAI engineers directly in the co-development process, and cost. El-Erian confirms that xAI was benchmarked as the lowest-cost provider among the major AI platforms, including OpenAI and Anthropic.
Just one week into launch, GoPuff is reporting measurable gains in basket size and purchase frequency. The conversation also touches on broader competitive dynamics — including reported plans by OpenAI to implement aggressive price cuts to defend enterprise market share. For those tracking the enterprise AI race, this interview offers direct insight into how a real company weighed the build-versus-buy decision and what xAI’s value proposition looks like from a paying customer’s perspective.
📺 Source: Bloomberg Technology · Published June 11, 2026
🏷️ Format: Interview
