Choco automates food distribution with AI agents

Overview

Choco introduced AI agents that automate order capture and processing across its food distribution platform, reducing manual work and enabling 24/7 order intake.

OrderAgent

OrderAgent processes multimodal inputs such as emails, SMS, images, and documents and converts them into structured, ERP‑ready orders by leveraging OpenAI APIs for transcription, extraction, and dynamic in‑context learning that resolves ambiguity using each customer’s ordering history and catalog.

VoiceAgent

VoiceAgent, powered by OpenAI’s Realtime API, lets customers place orders naturally over the phone with sub‑second latency, even outside business hours, handling speech‑to‑text and function calling in real time.

Implementation & Evaluation

Choco integrated OpenAI’s SDKs and APIs for speech‑to‑text, embeddings, and function calling, built a rigorous evaluation framework with ground‑truth datasets, continuous monitoring, and A/B testing, and added an optional Autopilot mode that automates order processing when confidence thresholds are met while retaining human review for edge cases.

Results

The system processes over 8.8 million orders annually, achieves up to a 50% reduction in manual order entry, delivers 2x productivity gains, maintains error rates below 1–5% with configurable automation thresholds, and supports 24/7 order intake eliminating delays from nights and weekends.

Leadership Lessons

Start with evaluation from day one: Even a small ground‑truth dataset (10–20 examples) enables teams to measure progress, validate improvements, and iterate with confidence. Invest in AI‑native observability: Debugging AI systems requires more than traditional logs—capturing model inputs, outputs, and reasoning traces is essential to understand and improve performance. Set the right expectations early: Unlike deterministic software, LLMs are probabilistic. Educating teams and users on this difference is key to building trust and avoiding friction during adoption.

What’s Next

Choco plans to expand its AI capabilities across the food distribution ecosystem, deepening the role of agents in executing complex operational workflows and enabling non‑engineers to act as “agent orchestrators” who design and manage intelligent systems that drive business outcomes, while scaling its use of OpenAI APIs to power more autonomous, context‑aware systems across sales, commerce, and supply chain operations.