Gopuff invented instant commerce. Thirteen years ago, two college sophomores started delivering everyday essentials in minutes, and that idea grew into a network of 460 microfulfillment centers across the US and UK, its own liquor licenses across 32 states plus ownership of the iconic BevMo! chain, millions of active customers, and strategic partnerships with brands like Starbucks. Having built the infrastructure, the company is now turning to a bigger question: what should shopping feel like in the age of AI?

The answer is “Go,” built over a year of co-development with xAI, now the AI division of SpaceX, and it opens with the first conversational voice AI in delivery. You talk, it shops, your order arrives in minutes. When it launched, Elon Musk himself posted in support of it. I sat down with co-founder Yakir Gola to talk about what they’ve built and why it changes how people buy what they need.

Dave Knox: You’ve spent thirteen years building Gopuff’s physical side, the infrastructure, supply chain, and assortment. What shifted your focus to the digital experience?

Yakir Gola: My co-founder Raf and I started Gopuff to solve a problem we lived with in college. I was the only one with a car, so I was always running errands for friends. We figured there had to be a better way to get everyday essentials.

For thirteen years we stayed obsessively focused on one thing: nailing instant delivery. It’s one of the hardest businesses in the world to get right. At our core, we’re retailers. Merchants. The whole culture runs on a sense of urgency for the customer, because this business is won in the details: the supply chain, the assortment, the shelf, the route, getting every order very, very right, millions of times over, all with strong economics and without the customer ever feeling it.

Go is our largest innovation yet in the shopping experience itself. Over the past couple of years, hundreds of millions of people changed how they access information almost overnight. They stopped searching and started conversing with AI. If ChatGPT and Grok are for information, Go is for instant shopping. We saw how much time that shift gives people back and asked ourselves: how do we bring it to our customers? Shopping was the last clunky part of the experience, so we set out to dramatically improve it.

Knox: Go leans heavily on voice, personalization, and visuals. Why do these deliver abetter experience?

Gola: The first feature is called Ask Go Anything, and it’s exactly that. Go is the first conversational voice AI in delivery. Not a chatbot, not voice search. A real conversation that ends with your order at your door in minutes. You say, “Go, add three lemons, chicken broth, and my usual breakfast,” and it happens.

This was incredibly hard to build. Voice AI that’s fast enough to feel natural, accurate enough to trust with your order, and connected to live local inventory is a brutally difficult engineering problem. If the voice takes five seconds to respond, it’s a demo, not a product. This is why our relationship with SpaceX is a deep strategic partnership. Our team and the xAI team have worked side by side for a year, using multiple layers of their technology, the language model, the voice AI, and the image AI, together in one experience. What they’ve built is some of the best AI technology in the world, and we were humbled to have Elon post about the launch.

Once people can talk to it, they stop searching and start asking. In the afternoon it’s “I’m making tacos tonight, what do I need?” In the evening it’s “build me dinner for $25” or “everything for game night.” People ask Go things they would never type into a search bar: “hosting six people in an hour.” “My kid has a fever, what do I need.” It’s a completely new relationship with our customers.

What makes Go able to answer is thirteen years of data. Hundreds of millions of deliveries. And we did it with a focused catalog of around 5,000 products. We know each product deeply, how it sells, when, where, with what, and to whom.

That knowledge powers the second feature: Moments. For the first time, you don’t shop products, you shop moments. Go uses AI-generated visuals to curate them around your life, even what your city is talking about on X. Game night when everyone’s buzzing about the Knicks. You see the moment, you tap it, and everything you need is in your cart.

And the third feature is the Go Bag. Once Go knows your preferences well enough, it adds the basics to your cart when you’re running low, coffee, eggs, toilet paper. We only autoadd when we’re extremely confident, because the whole point is that it feels like someone who knows you packed your bag, not an algorithm guessing. Ask, shop moments, or let Go handle it. All of it lives exclusively in the Gopuff app.

Knox: How does Go connect to everything you’ve built on the physical side?

Gola: Go is a first of its kind, and it’s only possible because of three things we own: the infrastructure, the data, and the technology. An AI shopping experience is only as good as what’s behind it, and behind Go is everything we’ve spent thirteen years building.

Every order gets delivered directly from one of our 460 micro-fulfillment centers. We own the inventory and manage it with our own software. So when Go recommends something,it’s on a shelf nearby and at your door in 20-30 minutes on average, often faster. And because it comes directly from us, it costs less than buying through a middleman. With no third-party shoppers in the middle, our order accuracy is 99.5 percent. The speed, the value, the reliability, it all comes from that vertical integration, and Go inherits every bit of it.

Knox: Gopuff has had a busy stretch, a fundraise, Howard Schultz joining the board, now Go. What’s next?

Gola: We’re excited about the early results from Go. Consumers are saving time and enjoying the experience. In addition to Go’s launch, we have a lot of momentum across the business.

When you put the speed, the value, and the personalization together, Gopuff starts to become a much better alternative to going to the store. More than 80 percent of convenience and grocery still happens in store, so we’re in the very early days with a long way to go.

Ultimately, we have a lot more to prove, a lot to learn, and for us it’s still day one. We’re constantly learning, constantly improving, and we must keep innovating for our customers.