I Used AI To Help Me Organize My Pantry. Here’s What Happened

Last November, Kim Kardashian was seen cozying up to a hot new someone in her life—but that someone wasn’t human. The world’s most influential influencer had released a series of thirst-trappy photos posing with Tesla’s Optimus, an AI-powered humanoid robot being developed to do “unsafe, repetitive or boring tasks, which could include daily household tasks like cleaning and cooking.”

With its chrome, muscular physique, Optimus looks like a dystopian nightmare. (I assumed the robots zooming around our homes one day would be cuter.) But despite its unsettling appearance—and putting any feelings I might have about Elon Musk aside—I find this swole and faceless stranger weirdly alluring.

Like most middle-aged working moms, I am often tired and overwhelmed. I’m also profoundly challenged in the domestic arts, especially when it comes to keeping my home organized and clutter-free. I sometimes fantasize about having a robot butler to tame the chaos hiding inside my closets and drawers. Is Kim Kardashian signalling that my dream of having one may actually be coming true?

Not quite. A May 21 video released by Tesla rocked the internet with a demonstration of Optimus doing domestic tasks like taking out the trash, stirring a pot and opening a cabinet, but the bots aren’t ready for commercial release. While I may not have a hunky robot butler at my beck and call at the moment, I am among the 30 percent of Canadians who regularly use generative AI, the artificial intelligence models like ChatGPT that can do things like generate a meal plan based on food preferences, chat with you in the style of your favourite anime character or spit out images from text descriptions, like, say, a creepy painting of Pikachu sitting in a French bistro in the style of Monet. I mostly use the technology at work for things like writing difficult emails or checking my budgets, but now Kim and Optimus have inspired me to figure out whether AI could help me get organized at home, too.

My first step is to go straight to the source. I already have a subscription to Gemini, Google’s generative AI chatbot, which runs me about $32 per month. I fire it up and input the prompt, “How can AI help me organize my house?” The response is a generic list of AI’s capabilities, like task management, followed by a flummoxing list of apps I could “explore.”

Since I stilI don’t know where to start, I try consulting an actual human instead: Kate Bowers, the co-founder of Hamilton, Ont.’s Action/Insight consulting firm, who coaches business leaders on using AI effectively. She puts me at ease by telling me that I don’t need multiple confusing and expensive tools to harness the powers of AI for home organization.

“Everyone and their uncle is trying to sell you their AI-powered tool right now,” she says, “but I'm not inclined to go out and learn a totally new platform because the learning curve is too high.” Rather than trying to find the perfect app for home organization, Bowers suggests I stick to using what I know, Gemini. She also advises me to approach this experiment with realistic expectations.

“If you think of AI as some all-knowing oracle that will magically solve all the problems in your life, you’re going to encounter instances where it gets things wrong,” she says. Instead, Bowers tells me to use more specific prompts to get the personalized organizational plan I’m looking for.

I decide to focus on organizing my bête noire, the tiny food pantry in my kitchen, which is overflowing with stuff like half-used boxes of pasta, loose, school-friendly granola bars and around 20 cans of beans. I now know that asking Gemini a generic question will give me a generic answer, so I work on writing a much more detailed prompt. It ends up being 300 words, and it goes something like, "I'm a busy mom with a chaotic kitchen pantry, and I need help. My main pantry is a tall, narrow space crammed with everything from baking supplies to a Dutch oven, and I can't find anything. Can you help me create an organization plan?” I include measurements for each shelf and the vertical space between them, as well as a description of the problems I have keeping the pantry organized. Gemini can read images, so I upload shots of the pantry from multiple angles.

But as I tell Gemini that I need a storage solution for the stale Halloween candy we’ve been eating for seven months, I’m starting to think about the larger implications of using artificial intelligence to do something so personal. Am I giving Gemini too much information about my home and habits? “One of the characteristics of domestic work is it's very private and very intimate,” says Ekaterina Hertog, an associate professor of AI and society at Oxford University. If I use Gemini for decluttering, I need to give it the kind of information about my belongings that could potentially reveal my income bracket and my tastes in general. “Quite often, the large companies behind many of these technologies already hold a lot of information about us. The more they have, the better they could potentially become at marketing and selling you something.”

Privacy policies for generative AI are complicated. Gemini’s policy says that the information I input won’t be used by Gemini to show me ads, but it also says Google may process my Gemini apps to “provide, improve and develop Google products, services and machine learning technologies.” Insert shrug emoji here. I’m not overtly served with ads related to pantry organization during this process, but I can’t be sure how Google will use my data in the future.

Hertog emphasizes that privacy is something we should think about when deciding whether to let AI take over our chores. She also asks a broader question that I hadn’t considered: Why do I want to offload my domestic tasks to a robot in the first place?

“We live in a capitalist society where a lot of people, and disproportionately so women, have to balance work and family. At the same time, there is pressure for them to work long hours, to give more, to be the ideal workers,” she says. “These social structures are potentially pushing people to feel that domestic work is a burden, not necessarily because they dislike it, but because we’re cornered into this situation.”

Would I find pleasure in organizing my home if I were less overwhelmed and exhausted in the first place? It’s something to consider, but the reality is that I’m a working mom who struggles with home organization. It would make my life easier if someone (or something) would come up with a pantry organization plan for me, so I ultimately choose to move forward with my project.

When I enter my prompt, Gemini spits out a step-by-step plan. It tells me how to adjust the pantry shelves to maximize space, which items to group together based on measurements and easy access, and what kind of bins I should use on each shelf. 

A lot of the information is still generic, like discarding expired items and spending 10 minutes a week on pantry maintenance. But some of the specific tips are helpful. For example, the plan includes the size and number of storage bins I should use on each shelf. It won’t give me shopping links for said bins, but when I find links myself and input them into the chat, it does offer feedback on which ones would work best. 

I have to prompt Gemini 45 times before I get a plan I’m happy with, and I’m keenly aware of the energy this exchange is consuming. Researchers estimate that querying a generative AI model like ChatGPT requires five times the amount of electricity as a web search. And despite industry efforts to mitigate the environmental impact, AI is still expected to consume up to 6.6 billion cubic metres of water by 2027. That’s six times Denmark's annual water usage.

Is it worth enlisting AI to help me organize my pantry? Some of Gemini’s suggestions do help me visualize my pantry differently, and the personalized plan motivates me to get the job done. I’m often embarrassed by how difficult I find home organizing to be, and it’s comforting to know that AI doesn’t care about my lack of domestic capabilities.

But it took about two hours to get to a usable plan, and it took about two hours more before I even got to the decluttering. And I’ll be honest: I don’t think AI made the decluttering process that much easier or faster. It still took me a whole weekend to complete the task. What Gemini did give me was the motivation to actually get started. Having a personalized plan laid out for me made the project seem less overwhelming. And while the pantry isn’t perfect, it’s functioning better. And seeing all of my clear storage bins does make me feel like an accomplished adult.  

Curious about whether the pros are using AI to make their jobs easier, I call Noreen Music, president of Professional Organizers in Canada. While she sees the benefits of using AI tools within Google Calendar to assist with family scheduling, she’s not worried that robots will make her profession obsolete.

“There's nothing like the human touch. When you're going through your pantry, you actually need to make those decisions about whether you keep something or get rid of it. A machine can't [do that].” I tend to agree. Though Gemini gave me a plan, I’m the one who had to decide whether to decant the granola, face the guilt of throwing out a box of crackers we didn’t like and figure out what to do with the Dutch oven. (It’s now in the laundry room beside the holiday decorations.) 

Sure, it’s fun to dream about Optimus taking over my most dreaded household chores. But at the end of the day, AI is just a tool. I’m still the ultimate decision maker—and action taker—when it comes to how I want my home to look and run. I guess like most things Kardashian, the reality of a robot butler is far less sexy than the fantasy.

Want more organization inspo? Check out how our editors tamed their disaster drawers, an overflowing closet and a jumbled home office.