Instacart announced Cart Assistant, a white-label AI shopping assistant that retailers can implement on their own websites and apps. The assistant allows consumers to look for deals, reorder items, and build carts from a photo of a shopping list. Food Bazaar, Heritage Grocers Group, and Woodman's are now live with Cart Assistant, with Aldi U.S., Harmon's, The Save Mart Companies, and Stew Leonard's set to follow.
Instacart also unveiled Clementine, a separate AI grocery shopping assistant available to users of Instacart's marketplace in the U.S. and Canada that turns conversational requests into personalized shopping carts. The move addresses a key competitive advantage: keeping shopper data on retailers' platforms rather than sharing it with third-party AI providers like OpenAI. The assistants leverage Instacart's more than 1.6 billion total orders to date, a catalog of over 2 billion items, and real-time inventory from about 100,000 stores across North America.
Generative AI-powered chatbot adoption among multi-brand retailers reached 21% in 2025, up significantly from 5% in 2024, according to Gartner data. However, Gartner research shows that 44% of U.S. consumers have expressed willingness to let AI tools assist with some types of shopping tasks, though consumers still prefer to maintain control of the experience rather than allowing AI to complete purchases on their behalf.