Loblaw Partners with Canadian AI Company Shakudo to Accelerate Its AI Adoption and Deployment

TORONTO, May 04, 2026 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) -- Loblaw Companies Limited (TSX: L; “Loblaw” or the “Company”) has partnered with Canadian technology firm Shakudo, as the Company continues to accelerate AI adoption to enhance its customer shopping experience and enhance its organizational capabilities. Shakudo’s platform enables companies to manage and scale AI, machine learning, and data infrastructure within complex technological environments. Loblaw will use this platform to build and run first-party AI applications, creating a centralized and consistent environment for its Digital and Technology & Analytics teams.

This partnership reflects Loblaw’s commitment to supporting Canadian innovation and technology, and marks another key milestone in the company’s ongoing efforts to increase its capabilities of rapidly deploying advanced systems and building ready-to-use tools internally.

“Speed matters, but standards matter more,” said Charu Pujari, Senior Vice President, Engineering and AI at Loblaw. “By partnering with Shakudo, we’ve given our teams a common platform to build on – so they can focus on solving real problems instead of reinventing core plumbing. It’s how we scale agentic capabilities responsibly, across many teams, without fragmentation.”

This partnership is central to how Loblaw builds AI: enabling faster development and consistent execution, while maintaining strict governance and oversight across all autonomous, agent-driven operations. As part of its AI integration strategy, Loblaw is establishing internal protocols that allow AI applications to securely interact with enterprise systems. Teams will use secure servers to coordinate AI-driven workflows, enhancing efficiency while maintaining governance and oversight.

“Loblaw is building exactly the kind of AI-native platform we designed Shakudo for,” said Yevgeniy Vahlis, Founder of Shakudo. “They’re not experimenting at the edges, they’re operationalizing agent orchestration at enterprise scale, with real standards, real workflows, and real impact. It’s exciting to see a Canadian company use Canadian AI technology as the backbone of such an ambitious effort.”

About Loblaw Companies Limited
Loblaw is Canada’s food and pharmacy leader, and the nation’s largest retailer. Loblaw provides Canadians with grocery, pharmacy, and healthcare services, other health and beauty products, apparel, general merchandise, financial services and wireless mobile products and services. With more than 2,800 locations, Loblaw, its franchisees and Associate-owners employ more than 220,000 full- and part-time employees, making it one of Canada’s largest private sector employers.

About Shakudo
Shakudo's operating system for AI helps enterprises accelerate their time to market with AI without ever sending their data out to third parties. By deploying within customers' own infrastructure, Shakudo delivers the flexibility of open-source tooling with enterprise-grade security—keeping sensitive data sovereign while unlocking AI capabilities across the organization.

For more information, contact pr@loblaw.ca. 

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