Instacart launches custom AI assistants for retailers, and its own

AI Strategies // September 9, 2026 Instacart launches custom AI assistants for retailers, and its own By Mitchell Parton Ivy Liu Retail giants like Walmart, Kroger and Amazon have launched AI assistants allowing consumers to ask for recommendations or curated shopping lists.

Now, Instacart has made it easier for other retailers, such as regional grocers, to follow in their footsteps. On Wednesday, Instacart announced the launch of Cart Assistant, a white-label assistant that retailers can implement on their own websites and apps.

This is the latest addition to Instacart’s suite of enterprise services for retailers, further democratizing access to the kind of technology that larger retailers build in-house. Instacart also powers retailers’ e-commerce marketplaces, advertising businesses and in-store technology such as digital price labels and smart carts.

Cart Assistant allows consumers to look for deals, reorder items and build carts from a photo of a shopping list. It was revealed as part of the announcement of Clementine, a separate AI grocery shopping assistant available to users of Instacart’s marketplace in the U. S. and Canada.

Clementine similarly aims to turn conversational requests, like ​​”I need a week of budget-friendly kid lunches,” “high-protein easy dinners for two” or “order my usuals,” into personalized digital shopping carts full of relevant items from a chosen store.

Instacart had previously launched integrations with ChatGPT late last year and with Claude in April, allowing shoppers to create shoppable grocery lists in the app.

However, the company was also looking to create a shopping assistant fully embedded within the Instacart marketplace and on retailers’ e-commerce websites so customers don’t have to go elsewhere, Ryan Hamburger, chief commercial officer at Instacart, told Modern Retail.

“We’re not sharing the same level of data with OpenAI as we would with the shopping assistant embedded on our platform,” Hamburger said. “Obviously, we want to make sure that data remains a competitive advantage for us and for our retail partners.” The assistants tap into Instacart’s data from its more than 1.

6 billion total orders to date, a catalog of more than 2 billion items and real-time inventory from about 100,000 stores across North America.

“All of those signals allow our shopping assistant and the ones we build for our retailers to just have better intuition, better responses and better engagement as a result of that foundation and, in our opinion, provide for a much better experience,” Hamburger said. Food Bazaar, Heritage Grocers Group and Woodman’s are now live with Cart Assistant. Aldi U.

S. , Harmon’s, The Save Mart Companies and Stew Leonard’s are set to follow. Cart Assistant ties into Instacart’s Storefront Pro e-commerce platform to make it simple for retailers to add it to their websites.

While retailers don’t have to build anything from scratch, it does allow for customization of elements such as the name of the assistant or the color palette to cater to specific brand preferences or demographics. Retailers can also integrate their loyalty programs or add in custom recipes.

“We’ve learned over the last 10 years of building our enterprise business that out-of-the-box turnkey solutions sound great, but retailers want to make sure they can continue to build on the brands that they’ve built over the last 100 years,” Hamburger said.

“We knew from day one for this to work and for it to be successful for our retailers, we had to allow that level of customization.” Hispanic retailer Heritage Grocers Group, for example, built out Spanish-language functionality in partnership with Instacart.

“Building something like this on our own would have required significant time and resources, which is why partnering with Instacart was a natural fit,” Adam Salgado, chief experience officer at Heritage Grocers Group, said in a statement. This comes after Kroger launched its own AI shopping assistant last month.

Like Kroger’s assistant, Instacart will also incorporate advertising functionality into Clementine by the end of this year, and plans to eventually bring that to its Cart Assistant retail partners as well. Ali Miller, GM of advertising at Instacart, said the company is “purposefully going slowly” when it comes to implementing advertising into Clementine.

“We really want to learn first what’s resonating with consumers at scale before we integrate ads directly,” Miller said. Hamburger also said the company wants to refine the consumer experience before layering ads on top.

Generative AI-powered chatbot adoption among multi-brand retailers reached 21% in 2025, up significantly from 5% in 2025, according to Gartner data from retailers using its Digit