Instacart Reports AI Agent Drives Bigger Grocery Orders

Instacart has begun rolling out an artificial intelligence (AI) assistant that puts together a grocery cart based on a conversation, the user’s selection of suggested prompts, or an uploaded photo of a grocery list.

The company tested the AI assistant for months, is now rolling it out to millions of U.S. customers through its app and website, and will complete a full rollout in the U.S. and Canada within months, it said in a Thursday (June 18) blog post.

The AI assistant is built directly into Instacart’s Marketplace and can build a cart based on messages such as “easy weeknight dinners for four,” “find deals on my usual items” or “appetizers for a graduation party,” according to the post.

Because it has access to live inventory data from early 100,000 stores across North America, the assistant will add to the cart only things that are in stock at the customer’s store, according to the release.

It also learns the customer’s favorite brands based on their order history, makes recommendations and finds items that are on sale, per the release.

“Since early this year, we’ve been testing the experience with consumers,” Instacart said in the post. “Early results show that they’re using our AI assistant not just to shop faster but to tackle more complex tasks, like recipe discovery and meal planning.”

The company also found that orders placed with the AI assistant are generally larger than typical orders, meaning consumers find it useful and use it to support their weekly shopping.

PYMNTS reported in May that during the company’s first quarter earnings call, Instacart CEO Chris Rogers said that the company has a decade of grocery data under its platform and is now turning that data into an agentic AI system that plans meals, builds a basket and predicts what shoppers forgot.

“With over 1.6 billion lifetime orders, we have a unique and deep understanding of the grocery journey, and we’re using that to build the gold standard of agentic grocery AI,” Roger said.

The PYMNTS Intelligence report “Global Digital Shopping Index: The AI-Powered Shopper Has Arrived” found that 64% of shoppers expect to shop with AI agents at least occasionally within the next two years, and 30% expect to do so frequently or almost always.

“That is a very high level of confidence for a new technology,” the report said. “Merchants should take this as a clear sign that agentic commerce is moving from experimentation toward mass adoption.”