Pick n Pay, the retailer under pressure on so many fronts, has leapt ahead in the delivery app wars with a new AI-powered service that is, frankly, impressive.For the longest time the clear winner in the hot new delivery app category has been Checkers’s Sixty60. Its range of offerings, larger products delivered by electric van, new Tinder-like shopping feature (which I really like), and reliable one-hour delivery time still make it the leader.But the new Pick n Pay chatbot shopping service called Penny, which is embedded in its latest asap! shopping app is a leap ahead. It is chatbot-like shopping at its finest.Take a picture of a bag of mielie meal, a can of chakalaka and another of tomato braai relish, plus a box of BBQ spices, and upload it to Penny. Ask it what is missing to make a boerewors, pap and chakalaka meal, and it will suggest both the remaining ingredients and a recipe.You can converse with the Google Gemini-powered chatbot using a written request, voice note or photograph. You can take a picture of a handwritten shopping list or of a recipe in a book and upload these. It handles a range of languages, including English, Afrikaans and Zulu.The results are 21st-century shopping.For a pasta sauce recipe, it loads a list of each ingredient (called a carousel) and lets you choose which of each to add to the basket, while suggesting other useful items. Give it an instruction to make dinner for four under R250, and it gives you a recipe with all the ingredients. It’s impressive. It has taken some of the schlep out of shopping. I used to be a much heavier user of delivery apps when I did all the groceries for my late mother and her carers. I used Sixty60 the most but have used asap!, Woolies Dash, and Takealot often. I started using Sixty60 before the Covid lockdowns of 2020 and was always happy with same-day delivery.Now, I feel like I did a few years ago when I was visiting a friend in London when we ran out of beer at about 5pm. He ordered a six-pack of Japanese beer like it was the most ordinary thing to do. My household is like that now. We do the vast majority of our shopping online and have it delivered. And yes, I found my favourite wheat beer and had it delivered one Saturday afternoon. Sadly, nobody stocks Hoegaarden anymore.Shopping, like everything from messaging to banking to the internet itself, is an app. And Pick n Pay just pulled ahead of the pack. The retailer may be fighting many fires, but it has scored a home run with this Penny update.The man behind it is the incredibly likeable Enrico Ferigolli. An Italian who has lived in South Africa for over a decade, he was frustrated that he couldn’t buy alcohol on a Saturday afternoon. So, he started a booze-specific delivery app called Bottles, which I had downloaded and tested. It did exactly as advertised and took the schlep out of ordering booze.When Covid struck, its partnership with Pick n Pay turned into an acquisition, and co-founder Ferigolli became the retail executive for omnichannel at the retailer. Pick n Pay is “moving from search-and-scroll shopping to conversation-led shopping”, he says.What makes him so refreshing is his lack of fear; doing a live demonstration earlier this month to launch the new Penny-enabled asap! app. He threw his new Gemini-powered chatbot every challenge anyone at the briefing asked. He was willing to test, and fail, in front of a room full of journalists and influencers. Most of these left-field ideas worked, impressively, but it was the most real and engaging demonstration of new technology that this jaded madala tech journalist has ever seen.Similarly, Discovery Bank’s new chatbot-like services allow you to take a picture of an invoice, from which it then pulls the recipient’s details and amount, and keys it up for you to pay. Those are really useful adaptations of this new form of AI-enabled service.Penny is a leap forward for mobile shopping, and similarly, services are likely to appear soon.Leo leapfrogs StarlinkIn other news, Amazon appears to have leapfrogged Starlink with a low-earth orbit (LEO) satellite service that will launch in South Africa next year.Local internet service provider Herotel will become an authorised distributor for Amazon Leo through a new service called Evry. Although Leo has only 3,000 satellites — compared to Starlink’s 12,000 — and is only likely to launch globally later this year, it is a coup for the competitor to the SpaceX-owned service.Amazon has chosen to partner with a local ISP for logistics and to overcome telecoms rules that require new licence entrants to give 30% of the operating company to previously disadvantaged communities.Starlink, which has wholly owned subsidiaries in the regions it operates in, is stuck in limbo between an intransigent regulator, Icasa, which refuses to take any policy directions from the communications minister to use alternative equity equivalents. South Africans in rural and remote areas could get broadband-like satellite connectivity right now but will have to wait until next year because of an obvious failure to use common sense by Icasa.Shapshak is editor-in-chief of Stuff.co.za Business Day