Inside Just Eat's AI Lab: Voice Agents & Agentic Commerce

About this episode

Guthrie Cooper leads product for the AI Innovation & Incubation domain at Just Eat Takeaway, the company that launched Europe's first online food ordering platform back in 2000 and is now part of Prosus. He joins an engineering lead from the same team to break down how they run an "incubator within an incubator," shipping prototypes in 2 to 4 weeks and betting on where agentic commerce, voice, and physical AI are heading next.

We get into voice agents built on the OpenAI Realtime API, the "beyond the app" strategy of meeting customers inside ChatGPT, Claude, and Gemini, and what it actually takes to ship AI features inside a 25-year-old, 16-country company.

What we cover:

- Incubator within an incubator: How a pre-seed team turns brand-new protocols into working prototypes in 2 to 4 weeks.

- Beyond the app: Why Just Eat is building for ChatGPT, Gemini, and search instead of only defending its own app.

- Voice as a mode, not a feature: Interruptible, contextual voice agents, and why a "voice companion" is harder than a voice mode.

- Conversational continuity: Keeping context alive across car, phone, and laptop without breaking the flow.

- Agentic commerce and MCP: System-to-system and agent-to-agent integrations, plus the privacy and consent line they refuse to cross.

- Convenience vs grievance: Why proactive notifications are a churn risk, and how to nudge without getting muted.

- Context engineering for voice: Preloading context, parallel tool calls, caching menus, and keeping prompts light so the agent does not hallucinate.

- How they decide what to build: Lean startup stage gates, scanning the horizon, painted doors, and killing your darlings.

- Ideas that died: Why location-based collection notifications never shipped, and what conversational search accidentally fixed.

- Physical AI: Drone delivery with Manna in Ireland, RIVR robot dogs in Switzerland, and orchestrated last-mile handoffs between humans and robots.

- AI-first org: AI champions, PMs shipping code, evals, and scaling usability testing with synthetic personas.

If you build AI products, work in commerce or logistics, or care about how voice and agents reshape how people buy, this one is for you.

Links & Resources:

- Just Eat Takeaway: https://www.justeattakeaway.com

- Just Eat AI Voice Assistant announcement: https://newsroom.justeattakeaway.com/en-WW/259937-introducing-the-next-evolution-of-ordering-just-eat-takeaway-com-unveils-ai-voice-assistant/

- Manna drone delivery: https://www.manna.aero

- OpenAI Agentic Commerce Protocol: https://developers.openai.com/commerce

- Model Context Protocol (MCP): https://modelcontextprotocol.io

Timestamps

00:00 Meet the AI Innovation & Incubation team

00:30 The incubator within an incubator

02:30 Just Eat's history and the Prosus era

05:00 Beyond the app: ChatGPT vs Google search

07:15 Conversational continuity across devices

09:35 Sharing data with ChatGPT and Claude, and the privacy line

11:18 Health data, Whoop, and the proactive coffee order

13:10 Friction points are why the incubator exists

14:15 Agentic commerce, MCP, and agent-to-agent

20:30 Hyper-personalization and the personal shopper

21:50 Convenience vs grievance: the notification trap

33:50 Super apps, WeChat, and autonomous agents

37:00 How they decide what to build: lean stage gates

48:45 The idea that died: location-based notifications

54:35 Putting ideas on ice: the Mercedes-Benz in-car app

58:30 The hard parts of building a voice agent

1:00:25 Latency, the OpenAI Realtime API, and preloading context

1:08:00 Physical AI: drones in Ireland and robot dogs in Switzerland

1:15:35 AI-first: champions, evals, and synthetic user testing

#AgenticCommerce #VoiceAI #DroneDelivery