Elon Musk’s SpaceX sent engineers to help Gopuff develop an artificial intelligence agent at a cheaper price than its competitors, said Rafael Ilishayev, the food delivery company’s co-chief executive officer.
SpaceX, through the AI venture now dubbed SpaceXAI, worked with Gopuff for months to develop a personal shopping assistant to help users buy products from the delivery company. The Go agent lets users purchase items by talking to the app and also provides a visual shopping feed, according to a statement .
Musk’s company, through its artificial intelligence unit previously called xAI, has boosted its sales team to secure deals with enterprise clients ahead of SpaceX’s initial public offering · . XAI has been leveraging Musk’s relationships to gain business, aiming to chip away at the dominance of Anthropic BPC and OpenAI in the corporate sales market. Gopuff has a connection to Musk’s business universe. Valor Equity Partners, the firm of longtime Musk backer Antonio Gracias, also is an investor in the food delivery company. Still, Ilishayev said xAI offered something different: months of work to develop an agent only for Gopuff at a cheaper cost.
“We looked at a lot of players, and cost was one of the factors,” Ilishayev said Thursday in an interview with Bloomberg Television. “The quality of the product and the willingness to codevelop together, all that gave us a lot of confidence to work together with SpaceX.”
XAI used a similar approach with payments company Shift4 Payments Inc., which planned to phase out OpenAI’s ChatGPT in favor of xAI’s Grok after on-site work with engineers, Bloomberg reported . Gopuff’s Go agent was powered by xAI’s video team, called Grok Imagine, which Musk described as one of xAI’s four core areas during a staff meeting in February. Musk said he was putting more resources into the video-creation product after OpenAI decided to discontinue its tool, Sora.
“We were looking for a partner with the right technology, which SpaceX is cutting edge in both voice and image generation,” Ilishayev said. The new agent powered by Grok generates realistic images of Gopuff’s inventory, pulls data from social network X and helps users build personalized carts as it learns from prior orders, according to the statement.
Jon Shulkin, a partner at Valor, was also deeply involved in xAI’s management for months, holding the role of chief revenue officer and boosting corporate client sales.