Instacart and Shipt separately announced Wednesday the launches of artificial intelligence-powered shopping assistants (Retail Dive - Technology). Clementine, Instacart's new marketplace tool, and Ask Shipt, available on Shipt's app and website, can build a grocery cart using a conversation with a customer or an uploaded photo (Retail Dive - Technology).
Clementine learns from users' preferences and past shopping behavior, bases product selections on inventory levels at the customer's chosen store, and can generate recipes, suggest savings opportunities, and automatically reorder items (Retail Dive - Technology). Ask Shipt can identify ingredients from photos, plan meals for parties, follow budget constraints, and surface promotions, with customers able to review and edit the AI-built cart before checkout (Retail Dive - Technology). For commerce practitioners, these tools represent a shift toward conversational and visual commerce interfaces that reduce decision fatigue and increase cart value by personalizing recommendations to household preferences and inventory constraints.
Clementine follows Instacart's earlier launch of Cart Assistant, an AI tool for retailer partners, with new retailers Food Bazaar, Heritage Grocers Group, and Woodman's Markets now offering it (Retail Dive - Technology). Shipt also announced a forthcoming Shared Lists feature enabling multiple people to contribute to a shopping list, and previously integrated with ChatGPT and Claude in August (Retail Dive - Technology).