Glovo Is Now Inside ChatGPT and Claude. We Set It Up and Ordered Snacks in Kasarani.

Glovo has announced a “Shopping Assistant” that plugs the app into two AI chatbots, OpenAI’s ChatGPT and Anthropic’s Claude. The pitch is that you stop scrolling through menus and filters, and instead just describe what you want in ordinary language. The AI does the searching.

Before anything else, two things you should know. This is not a Kenya-first launch. Glovo announced the same integration in Spain on 28 May 2026, and Spanish outlets covered it then. The release only reached Kenyan newsrooms today. And the release itself came with no links, no setup instructions, and an example price quoted in euros. So we set it up ourselves and tested it.

What it does, in practice

You link your Glovo account to the chatbot once. After that, you can ask for things the way you would ask a friend.

We asked Claude for snacks for around 400 bob near Kasarani. It came back with a list drawn from stores actually near that location, with product names, the shop, and prices. You can keep talking to it. Ask it to stay under a budget, or swap an item, and it remembers what you said earlier in the conversation. Glovo says the assistant returns a carousel of up to five product options with images, store details, ratings and prices.

Then it stops. You cannot pay inside the chat. Every product has a “View on Glovo” button that throws you back into the Glovo app or website, where you complete the order and pay as normal. The AI handles discovery, but Glovo keeps the checkout.

How to actually set it up

Glovo’s presser shared with us did not explain this, so here it is.

On Claude, on desktop: click Customize in the sidebar, scroll to Connectors, click Add connectors, search for Glovo, and add it. Then, inside a chat, click the + button and switch the Glovo connector on. From there you can ask it to browse stores and products.

On ChatGPT, we could not find it. The app should appear in ChatGPT’s apps directory, and we looked. No Glovo.

One caveat on cost. We ran our test on a paid Claude subscription. Anthropic’s own documentation says directory connectors are available on Free, Pro, Max, Team and Enterprise plans, so a free account should in principle work. Some documentation also indicates that the richer interactive app interface, the one that renders the product carousel, is limited to paid plans. We have not verified the free-tier experience ourselves. If you try it on a free account, tell us what you see.

Why Glovo is really doing this

The honest answer is search.

For twenty years, the way you found a product online was to type words into Google. That is changing, and the numbers are not small. Adobe Analytics, which tracks more than a trillion visits to US retail sites, found traffic arriving at retail sites from AI assistants grew 393% year on year in the first quarter of 2026. Over the 2025 US holiday season it was up 693%. More importantly for a business, that traffic now converts. In March 2026, shoppers who arrived from an AI assistant bought at a 42% higher rate than shoppers from other channels. A year earlier, they converted worse.

Two things to note: One, Adobe’s data is US retail, not global and certainly not Kenyan. And, two, in Adobe’s own March 2026 breakdown, grocery was one of the weaker categories for AI-referred traffic, which is awkward given that groceries and retail are exactly where Glovo has started.

Read it as a positioning move. If people begin their shopping inside a chatbot, the businesses that are not inside that chatbot become invisible. Whether Kenyans are actually shopping this way today is a different question, and the answer right now is mostly no.

There is also the implication worth naming for the roughly 6,000 merchants on Glovo Kenya, most of them small businesses. Search results in the app are a long scrollable list. An AI answer is five items. Fewer slots means the rules for who gets seen matter more, and those rules are not published.

The data question

To use this, you are granting an American AI company access to your Glovo account. That means your location, your searches, and potentially your order history flow to OpenAI or Anthropic, and are processed on their infrastructure under their terms, outside Kenya.

Kenya’s Data Protection Act 2019 governs this, and the Office of the Data Protection Commissioner requires a lawful basis for cross-border transfers of personal data. Linking the account yourself is consent, so this is legal. It is still a choice you are making, and it is worth making it knowingly rather than by clicking through. Anthropic’s documentation is explicit that connected services process data on their own infrastructure, under their own terms.

What to make of it

The feature works, at least on Claude, and it is a genuinely faster way to browse if you already live inside a chatbot. But it is discovery only. You still finish the job in the Glovo app, which is free and already on your phone. For most Kenyans, this changes nothing about how they order lunch.

Where it matter is what it signals. Glovo, which has just committed KES 10 billion to Kenya by 2030 and made Nairobi its African hub, is positioning for a world where product discovery moves out of apps and into assistants. It is being led there by a Kenyan. Shiro Theuri, the CTO quoted in the announcement, was headhunted from Nairobi in 2022 and now runs Glovo’s global technology organisation from Barcelona.

If you are a developer, this is worth poking at now. If you are a merchant on Glovo, start asking how products get chosen for those five slots. If you are just hungry, just open the app.

Have you got the Glovo connector working on ChatGPT, or on a free Claude account? Tell us at mail@tech-ish.com.