Shana Basnight (someone, 6.9K followers) named her AI 'Marigold' and asked for a dad's-birthday restaurant (steak, Inman Park). Marigold suggested Kevin Rathbun Steak, Two Urban Licks, and Il Premio; when the first was closed on Sundays, she offered a backup and, with permission, booked a table for four at Two Urban Licks via OpenTable.
A weekly scheduled plan writes the week's dinners into their Google Calendar, trained on the family's dietary needs, restrictions and preferences. It checks the local weather forecast and the calendar itself, so a hot day gets burgers on the grill, a cool night gets chili, and travel days or evening commitments get easy low stress meals. They eat out far less now.
A user set up an AI food team under his chief-of-staff bot: a Meal Organiser that knows the lunches and dinners he likes, a Shopper that fills his grocery cart, and a Cooking Bot that walks him through each meal. He says the shopping takes under 3 minutes versus about an hour at the shops or 30 minutes online, with meals cooked in under 20 minutes; he checks out himself.
He photographed his pantry and listed everything in his fridge and freezer, and it built three weeks of meal plans to use up as much perishable food as possible. In week four it worked from his grocery store's ad with a budget of $50 to buy as little new food as possible and keep the plan going. He is on month two of this.
He is a software product manager who cannot code. His app GoodFinds turns restaurant recommendations from people you trust, chefs, publications, influencers and friends, into a live map, and it is out on the App Store. The AI wrote all the code. He also had it build the data pipeline behind the app, which pulls venues out of influencer posts and chef interviews and matches them against Google Places, and a monitor that watches food subreddits and pings him on Telegram when a thread is worth replying to.
Nutri is a Boston-area meal delivery service whose website and app are cumbersome with screen readers. The reviewer told the AI to delete all prefilled meals and give a numbered list of about 10 at a time; he replies with numbers like 'I want 5 and 8' and the AI updates and finalizes the order on the Nutri website.
Michelle Solomon (recipes/homemaking, 9.5K) typed her weekly meal plan for four into AI, which returned a consolidated grocery list organized by produce, meat/seafood, etc., keeping the total under $200 using store-brand picks. She approved the AI logging into her grocery account; the groceries arrived and she cooked glazed chicken breasts.
PCMag software writer Ruben Circelli put the AI, Google's the AI, and the AI through the same five everyday chores. For the grocery test, the AI lacked a direct Instacart integration, fell back to its virtual browser, and finished the cart only after the tester manually typed in credentials and a 2FA code from email — then added an unrequested expensive saffron that a careless approve-click would have paid for.
This only partly worked. Worth knowing before you try it.
Dylan Heagy photographed a fridge whiteboard and asked the AI to order the grocery list from Sam's Club. Photo-to-cart grocery ordering: the list never gets retyped, it just gets bought.
A man's system reads his grocery receipts from email and predicts which items will need restocking, building his shopping list on its own. When he is ready, the AI logs into his online grocery shop, adds the items and books the delivery slot.