The news: Instacart and Shipt both launched AI assistants designed to make digital grocery shopping easier.

• Instacart’s Clementine AI shopping assistant helps shoppers build carts around prompts such as “I need a week of budget-friendly kid lunches,” using real-time inventory from a customer’s chosen store or stores.
• Instacart also rolled out Cart Assistant, a white-label version of the tool that many grocers use, which lets shoppers find deals, reorder items, or build a cart from a photo of a shopping list.
• Shipt’s Ask Shipt similarly lets shoppers describe what they need—such as “Create a cart for my Saturday tailgate for 25 people”—or upload a photo to generate a cart.

Zooming in: Neither company is confining its assistant to its own ecosystem.

• Instacart is licensing Cart Assistant to retailers and has connected its marketplace to Gemini, ChatGPT, and Google’s AI Mode, giving grocers a way to surface their products wherever consumers turn to AI for shopping help.
• Shipt takes a slightly different approach, letting consumers shop across its more than 100 retail partners directly inside ChatGPT and Claude rather than requiring them to visit a dedicated app.

Zooming out: The launches add to a wave of grocery AI activity across the industry, which includes tools from Amazon, Walmart, Albertsons, Schnucks, and Kroger.

• Commerce platforms can combine shopper intent with availability, promotions, and item options to encourage product exploration and influence purchase decisions.
• In the grocery category specifically, consumers’ tendency to buy the same items—coupled with clear desires such as dietary restrictions or pricing—support AI’s value proposition of ideating, planning, and shopping all within the same interface.

Why it matters: Both Instacart and Shipt are trying to position themselves between what shoppers want and what ultimately lands in their carts.

• For a company like Instacart, which accounts for 17.0% of US grocery ecommerce sales, that could help it capture more transactions while also generating valuable intent data, from what consumers plan to cook to how much they want to spend.