Introducing New Enterprise AI Solutions to Democratize AI for Grocers of All Sizes

AI is rapidly changing the way people shop for groceries and feed their families. It has evolved to the point where it not only answers people’s questions but also anticipates their needs, personalizes suggestions, and takes action on their behalf. 

The speed of AI-driven change has retailers everywhere asking the same question: How do we compete in an AI-first world? 

Built on years of powering the digital transformation of the grocery industry, no other company sits at the intersection of grocery, retail, and technology like Instacart. Retailers choose to deeply partner with us because we provide the technology, scale, and capabilities that give them a strategic edge - and we’re excited to bring AI innovation to even more online storefronts, store shelves, shopping carts, and more. 

Today, we’re announcing Instacart’s AI Solutions, a new collection of enterprise offerings that bring AI-powered capabilities to our retail partners, regardless of size. AI Solutions will focus on five key areas:

• Agentic Commerce - Through our close partnerships and ongoing efforts with generative AI companies, we’re helping define how grocery shopping works across the next generation of digital agents - ensuring our retail partners are well-positioned to succeed.
• AI Assistant – Instacart’s AI assistant - known as Cart Assistant - delivers AI-powered, omnichannel support for grocery shopping. From meal planning to product recommendations, it learns with every interaction, making shopping easier, smarter, and seamlessly connected across online and in-store channels.
• In-Store Intelligence – Store View provides real-time visibility into store shelves, turning images and video into actionable insights with AI and computer vision. Integrated with Caper Carts, it offers continuous inventory tracking and heat mapping, helping retailers improve accuracy, reduce friction, and keep products in stock.
• Catalog Intelligence – Our AI Catalog Intelligence - known as Catalog Engine - helps retailers create smarter, richer catalogs with nutrition, ingredient, and product data. The result: more accurate, personalized, and intelligent shopping experiences across every channel.
• Agentic Analytics - Our agentic analytics capabilities turn retail data into instant, actionable insights by layering Instacart’s agentic AI architecture onto a retailer’s existing data stack, enabling teams to ask complex questions and get real answers in seconds that drive smarter decisions, greater efficiency, and better customer experiences.

AI Solutions mark a new chapter in our enterprise story, empowering retailers to turn agentic AI into a true competitive edge. In an era of rapid technological change, we’re helping grocers not only keep pace, but also compete - and win.

Built specifically for the unique complexity of grocery, Instacart’s AI Solutions integrate deeply across every layer of the shopping journey - enabling retailers to reach customers on leading AI platforms, guide shopping decisions with a branded assistant, and keep shelves stocked - so conversations turn into satisfied repeat customers. Powered by more than a decade of data and insights into real customer behavior, as well as over 1.5 billion lifetime orders, our offerings enable retailers to deliver the best experience and outcomes, across customer acquisition, e-commerce and in-store experiences, and fulfillment.

Agentic Commerce: Integrations with AI Leaders Like OpenAI, Google, Microsoft, and More

Through our close partnerships and ongoing efforts with generative AI companies such as OpenAI, Google, Microsoft, and others, we’re helping define how grocery shopping works across the next generation of digital agents - ensuring our retail partners are well-positioned to succeed. 

More than a single storefront, Instacart provides access to over 1,800 retail partners: national chains, regional favorites, and local independents. Over time, we expect every generative AI company to connect seamlessly into Instacart’s grocery engine, linking their massive consumer reach with our network of retail partners and driving incremental demand. As consumers adopt AI platforms for ideation and shopping, our collaboration with generative AI companies enables retailers to capture a larger share of these evolving, AI-driven baskets.

Cart Assistant: Bringing AI-driven Conversational Experiences to Retailers’ Websites and Stores

Consumers are quickly coming to expect smart, conversational assistants that can help them plan, ideate, and save everywhere they shop. Through our white-label AI assistant, known as Cart Assistant, Instacart is helping retailers meet that expectation.

Cart Assistant offers enterprise-grade, agentic features purpose-built for the grocery industry. Designed to work seamlessly across retailers’ e-commerce sites and in-store environments, Cart Assistant can be integrated through Storefront Pro online, embedded into Caper Carts in-store, or built for a retailer’s in-house e-commerce platform. 

Much more than a simple chat client, Cart Assistant is an AI-powered, personalized, omnichannel shopping companion designed to make grocery shopping easier, smarter, and more personal. It syncs with each customer’s provided preferences, such as dietary goals and purchase history to make shopping more intuitive - supporting meal planning, budgeting, and nutrition at every step. Customers can turn to it anytime for help - whether they’re looking for meal ideas, seeking recommendations, or quick answers while shopping. For example, customers might ask:

• “Can you suggest some weeknight dinner ideas?”
• “What are some gluten-free alternatives to this recipe?”
• “Based on what I ordered last week, can you help me make a shopping list for the week?”

Over time, Cart Assistant will evolve to offer more proactive and personalized guidance, anticipating customer needs and making grocery shopping easier and more intuitive. For example, as you push a Caper Cart down the aisle, Cart Assistant will suggest your favorite items that are on sale, build personalized meal plans based on what’s in your cart, and flag any missing items before you check out. Over the coming months, Sprouts Farmers Market will collaborate on Cart Assistant across its website and app (both powered by Storefront Pro), as well as Caper Carts. Separately, Kroger will launch Cart Assistant within its first-party Kroger iOS App.

By understanding previously bought items, ongoing grocery lists, household preferences, and location in-store, Cart Assistant streamlines shopping by taking things that used to be hard – planning and shopping meals, finding products that meet your dietary needs, making a weekly grocery list, and making them effortless. It learns and adapts with every interaction, becoming a smarter, more intuitive companion, whether online or in-store, and will continuously update with the latest advancements in AI, ensuring that retailers and their customers benefit from the most intelligent, connected, and conversational grocery experience possible.

Cart Assistant can be integrated on a retail e-commerce site or app, and on Caper Cart screens, bridging the gap between online and in-store experiences like never before.

In-Store Intelligence: Delivering Inventory Intelligence and In-Store Insights

Grocery is more complex than ever, with fragmented data, unpredictable supply chains, and rising consumer expectations both online and in-store. Our retail partners are under pressure to offer an incredible selection and keep shelves stocked, competing with ecommerce tech giants that have far deeper AI resources. 

That’s why we recently launched Store View, an AI-powered tool designed to fundamentally transform and improve retailers’ inventory intelligence. At its core, Store View is a true data product, giving retailers a dynamic, real-time picture of what’s happening on their shelves. It combines images and videos captured by Instacart shoppers or store associates with our advanced computer vision and AI models to automatically analyze inventory. The system identifies products that are well-stocked, running low, or out of stock entirely - turning visual data into actionable insights. Store View is currently live with Good Food Holdings and will soon launch at McKeever’s.

With this level of on-shelf inventory understanding, retailers can reduce operational friction, improve forecasting accuracy, and ensure product availability for customers, both online and in-store. Consumers also benefit from improved availability and the confidence that their favorite items are always in stock, resulting in increased satisfaction and loyalty.

And Caper Carts take continuous inventory tracking to the next level, utilizing edge AI and advanced sensor fusion for item recognition, to provide a constant stream of shelf data that enhances Store View’s accuracy. They also enable heat mapping, giving retailers valuable insights into traffic patterns and engagement across aisles.

With Store View, continuous shelf monitoring can be done by Shopper and Caper Cart AI-driven imaging.

Catalog Intelligence: AI-First Catalogs that Improve Consumer Outcomes

In an AI-powered world, the catalog is the foundation of every digital and in-store experience. Without deep, structured data, even the most advanced AI systems struggle to understand what products truly are, what they pair with, and who they’re right for. That’s why Instacart has invested heavily in machine learning and AI to supercharge the Instacart Marketplace catalog, adding layers of meaning such as nutrition facts, health tags, and contextual attributes. 

Now, we’re bringing those capabilities to our retail partners with Catalog Engine, a new offering that helps retail partners elevate their catalogs to an AI-first standard, built to power the next generation of intelligent shopping experiences. Catalog Engine will be available to both Storefront Pro retailers and non-Storefront Pro partners, giving our retail partners access to enterprise-grade AI tools that make their catalogs smarter.

Catalog Engine leverages AI-driven extraction of more than 1.3 billion data points, combining Vision-Language Models (VLMs) with scaled Human-in-the-Loop (HITL) verification to ensure accuracy and eliminate duplicates. The result is an AI-enriched catalog that has a more complete, contextual understanding of every product, including health attributes, nutritional information, ingredients, product taxonomy, product claims, allergens, and more.

A richer, high-quality catalog helps AI systems interpret the intent behind a request, understanding, for example, that when a customer asks for “healthy breakfast cereal for kids,” it should infer low sugar, whole grains, and fortified vitamins, even if those words don’t appear in the product description. 

Ultimately, the quality of catalog data determines the quality of the customer experience. With Catalog Engine, retailers can deliver more accurate, personalized, and satisfying experiences - while also driving increased sales - and set a new industry standard for how inferred data powers grocery commerce.

Catalog Engine uses AI to create a more complete, contextual understanding of every product, including health attributes, nutritional information and ingredients.

Agentic Analytics: Turning Retail Data into Instant Intelligence

Our agentic analytics capabilities transform retail data into actionable insights that are fast, accurate, and accessible for retail partners. By layering Instacart’s agentic AI architecture on top of a retailer’s existing data stack, we’re making it possible for our retail partners to ask complex analytical questions and get real answers in seconds.

Powered by Instacart’s proprietary AI machine learning models, our agentic analytics capabilities understand retail data models, run sophisticated analyses, and deliver clear, tailored insights about how consumers interact with them through dedicated portals for merchandising, marketing, operations, and leadership teams. Whether analyzing their e-commerce trends, Store View inventory data, or operational metrics, it can instantly answer questions such as: Which campaigns are driving the highest lift? How does fulfillment speed impact retention? How are new customers engaging with our offers compared to loyal ones?

By surfacing trends, recommendations, and opportunities automatically, it empowers smarter, faster decisions that drive growth and efficiency. This intelligence translates into better experiences for customers, too, from improved product availability to better personalization. 

Powering The Future of Grocery

AI is transforming commerce, and Instacart is the enablement partner making sure our retail partners lead the way, no matter their size.

By blending our world-class technology with deep integrations and AI platform partnerships, we’re enabling our retail partners to thrive and grow in an AI-powered world.

The future of grocery isn’t just online or in-store - it’s also everywhere AI is, guided by a personalized understanding of your needs. And Instacart will be there, working to help power it for every retail partner. 

Learn more about our AI Solutions here. 

Forward-Looking Statements

This blog post contains forward-looking statements within the meaning of the Private Securities Litigation Reform Act of 1995. All statements other than statements of historical fact could be deemed forward-looking, including without limitation statements regarding the launch, performance, availability, and functionality of Instacart’s AI Solutions, the anticipated benefits of Instacart’s AI Solutions for retailers, customers, and others, the growth and launch timing of our AI partners and integrations, our expectations for our partnerships and efforts with certain AI partners, changes to the grocery industry, consumer behavior, and AI adoption, and our other expectations, strategies, priorities, plans, and intentions regarding AI. These forward-looking statements are subject to known and unknown risks, uncertainties, assumptions, and other factors that may cause actual results or outcomes to be materially different from any future results or outcomes expressed or implied by the forward-looking statements, including those described from time to time in our filings with the Securities and Exchange Commission. Except as required by law, we undertake no obligation, and do not intend, to update these forward-looking statements.