AI might soon pop up at a grocery store near you — specifically, in your shopping cart.
Instacart is aiming to roll out Cart Assistant, an AI agent that can help shoppers make decisions about what to buy when they start shopping, Instacart CEO Chris Rogers said during the company’s earnings call on Monday. Instacart is adding the AI tool to the websites it runs for retailers, as well as some of its Caper smart shopping carts.
Sprouts Farmers Market plans to add the tech to Caper carts at its stores, Instacart said last week. The delivery service has been expanding the use of its smart carts since acquiring Caper AI, the company that manufactures them, in 2021. The carts automatically scan items as customers place them in the cart and contain screens that allow users to keep a tally of their spending, pull coupons, and pay for their purchases.
Agentic AI is set to join that list of functions, Rogers said. Imagine going to the store to buy food for a party with 10 people, for instance, and asking Cart Assistant what to buy within your budget, Rogers said during the company’s third-quarter earnings call on Monday.
The AI agent could also assist customers mid-shop, including by making sure that nothing a customer has selected contains an unwanted ingredient, he said.
“At the end of the shop, you could say, ‘Check my entire basket for any gluten,'” Rogers said on the call.
Cart Assistant is one of the AI-based services that Instacart said last week it plans to offer to retailers. Others include using AI to track which items are out of stock at a store or analyzing product data to make better shopping suggestions for customers.
While Instacart continues to build its delivery service, which relies on gig-worker shoppers to buy items at stores and deliver them to customers, it’s also expanding its business-to-business operations by selling technology to grocery stores.
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Since its founding in 2012, Instacart has accumulated data at many different retailers about what people buy — exactly the kind of information that can be useful for training AI models, Rogers said.
“We have incredible data from our $1.5 billion orders to date,” Rogers said. “We have a rich catalog of 17 million unique items. We understand people’s preferences.”
Other retailers are also figuring out how AI might change the shopping experience.
Last month, Walmart and OpenAI struck a partnership that aims to enable users to order items from the big-box retailer directly through ChatGPT.
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