Zepto Cafe Now Lets You Order via AI Models
Analytics India Magazine (Supreeth Koundinya)
Indian quick-commerce firm Zepto has released an internal tool that allows users to place Zepto Cafe orders using natural-language instructions through an LLM such as Anthropic’s Claude.
The tool, built by a Zepto engineer and shared publicly on GitHub, was amplified on LinkedIn by co-founder and CEO Aadit Palicha.
It is based on MCP (Model Context Protocol), an open-source framework from Anthropic that serves as the coordination layer between the AI model and live services, deciding what action to take and when.
Unlike traditional chatbots that rely only on their training data, MCP enables models to access fresh, permissioned information and trigger specific workflows through a controlled interface. In Zepto’s setup, MCP interprets the user’s text instruction and routes it to the appropriate action.
Execution of those actions is handled by Playwright, which serves as the browser automation layer.
Playwright controls a real web browser to navigate Zepto’s website, select the delivery address, add items to the cart, and place the order—replicating the steps a human user would take rather than calling a backend API.
In a demo video, Pranav Chandra Prodduturi, a senior category manager at Zepto, showed Claude placing a Zepto Cafe dessert order at a chosen address via the MCP server.
“Interesting projects getting built in our office these days,” said Palicha, congratulating his colleague in the LinkedIn post.
The capability is not available through Zepto’s consumer app or website. Users must manually set up the MCP server and log in to Zepto via a web browser for the automation to work.
On security, Zepto notes that phone numbers are passed via environment variables rather than embedded in code, ensuring sensitive identifiers never enter the codebase, version control, or logs.
Authentication is handled through a manual browser login, with sessions stored only on the user’s local machine and never committed to the repository.
The system uses no API keys or hard-coded credentials. Because Playwright operates inside a real browser session, the automation inherits Zepto’s existing web security controls rather than bypassing them.
Similar experiments are emerging across India’s consumer internet ecosystem. Recently, Zomato built a similar MCP server that lets users order food via text-based prompts.
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