How Instacart uses AI

Instacart's Cart Assistant builds a grocery cart from a conversation, a photo of a list or a prompt such as "easy weeknight dinners for four", using live store inventory and the shopper's order history. In May 2026 it was in testing and available to about 25% of U.S. customers, with a wider rollout to U.S. and Canadian customers announced in June. In its second quarter 2026 results release Instacart said orders placed with the assistant are, on average, larger than its $115 average order value, and that it was still in pilot. Retailers can license a white label version for their own sites.

Instacart became a design partner for SAFE's autonomous third party risk management platform, which the vendor says runs on 25 or more AI agents for onboarding, due diligence, vendor tiering and monitoring. SAFE says Instacart onboarded and assessed more than 600 third parties in three weeks, parsed more than 1,000 documents such as SOC 2 reports in minutes, and saved more than 1,800 analyst minutes per assessment cycle without added headcount. Instacart's staff engineer is quoted on better risk differentiation and less friction, without numbers.

On 8 December 2025 Instacart launched an app inside ChatGPT that builds a grocery cart from a conversation, lets the shopper review it and pays through Instant Checkout, built on the Agentic Commerce Protocol with Stripe processing the payment. The release says the items are then shopped and delivered through Instacart's platform, and describes a partnership with more than 1,800 retail banners. In 2026 it extended the same approach to other AI platforms: management said on the first quarter call that it had integrated with ChatGPT and most recently Claude, and its second quarter release says it became Google's first grocery partner to integrate with Gemini. No order volume or conversion figures from these channels are disclosed.