US grocery tech company Instacart has launched a suite of AI enterprise offerings to help grocers of all sizes compete.

Built specifically for the complexity of grocery, these extend Instacart’s technology across online storefronts, store shelves and shopping carts, helping retailers deliver smarter, more personalised shopping experiences through AI.

“AI is transforming how people shop for groceries and feed their families, and Instacart is uniquely positioned to help retailers – from national chains and regional favourites to local independents – harness that change and drive meaningful results for their customers and business,” said Chris Rogers, CEO of Instacart. “These mark the next chapter in our enterprise story, empowering retailers to turn generative and agentic AI into a true competitive edge. In an era of rapid technological change, we’re helping grocers of all sizes not only keep pace, but also compete and win in an AI-powered world.”

The AI offerings will focus on five areas:

• Agentic commerce: Through close partnerships and ongoing efforts with generative AI companies, Instacart is helping define how grocery shopping works across digital agents, ensuring retail partners are well-positioned to succeed.
• AI assistant: Known as Cart Assistant, this 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.
• Catalogue intelligence: The catalogue engine helps retailers create smarter, richer catalogues with nutrition, ingredient and product data. The result is more accurate, personalised and intelligent shopping experiences across every channel.
• Agentic analytics: These 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.

Through partnerships and ongoing efforts with generative AI companies such as OpenAI, Google and Microsoft, Instacart is helping define how grocery shopping works across digital agents.

The California company provides access to over 1800 retail partners including national chains, regional favourites and local independents. Over time, it expects every generative AI company to connect seamlessly into Instacart’s grocery engine, linking a massive consumer reach with its network of retail partners and driving incremental demand. As consumers adopt AI platforms for ideation and shopping, the collaboration with generative AI companies should help retailers capture a larger share of these evolving, AI-driven baskets.

The AI-powered Cart Assistant comprises enterprise-grade, white-label agentic tools purpose-built for grocery. Designed to work across retailers’ web sites and in-store environments, it can be integrated through Storefront Pro online or embedded into Caper Carts in-store, connecting the online and in-person experience. More than a chat client, Cart Assistant is a personalised, omnichannel shopping companion that supports meal planning, budgeting and nutrition, while learning from each customer’s preferences and purchase history to anticipate needs and simplify the shopping journey.

Over the coming months, Sprouts Farmers Market will collaborate on Cart Assistant across its web site and app, both powered by Storefront Pro, as well as Caper Carts.

“Sprouts is proud to collaborate with Instacart to test Cart Assistant with our customers,” said Nick Konat, president of Sprouts Farmers Market (www.sprouts.com). “AI is transforming the way people shop, and today’s customers want the experience to be more personal and intuitive. We’re excited to leverage AI technology to make it easier than ever for Sprouts Farmers Market customers – especially our health enthusiasts – to personalise their experience so they can easily shop our curated assortment to find those unique items for their lifestyle and discover exciting, new emerging brands.”

Separately, Kroger will launch Cart Assistant within its first-party Kroger iOS app.

“At Kroger, we want to make shopping easier, ensuring families can find their favourite foods whenever they want them,” said Yael Cosset, executive vice president at Kroger (www.kroger.com). “Instacart is a trusted technology collaborator and we continuously evolve to meet our customers where they are. Together, we are bringing next-generation AI to our customers in the Kroger iOS app, giving our customers a more personalised and convenient grocery experience.”

Instacart’s inventory intelligence gives retailers a real-time view of what’s on their shelves at any given moment. Recently launched, Store View combines images and videos captured by Instacart shoppers and Caper Carts with computer vision models to identify automatically which products are in stock, running low or out of stock entirely. Store View is already live with Good Food Holdings and will soon launch at McKeever’s.

“We’re excited to partner with Instacart on technology that pushes the grocery industry forward,” said Andrew Krysiak, senior director at Good Food Holdings (goodfoodholdings.com). “Store View gives us a powerful new layer of visibility that’s helping us enhance the customer experience today while also creating more opportunities to leverage the ecosystem to add further value for our customers tomorrow.”

The catalogue engine helps retailers elevate their product catalogues to an AI-first standard, giving them a richer, more contextual understanding of every item they sell. The system uses AI-driven extraction of over 1.3 billion data points, powered by vision-language models (VLMs) and human-in-the-loop (HiL) validation, to enhance product data with details such as nutrition facts, health tags, allergens and contextual attributes.

Agentic analytics capabilities transform retail data into actionable insights that are fast, accurate and accessible for retail partners. Layering Instacart’s agentic AI architecture on top of a retailer’s existing data stack makes it possible for retailers to ask complex analytical questions and get real answers in seconds.

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

Learn more about the AI offering at www.instacart.com/company/retailer-platform/ai-solutions.

• Grubhub (www.grubhub.com) and Instacart are teaming up to bring a wider selection of grocers, greater convenience and better value to Grubhub’s customers. Through this partnership, Grubhub customers can order from Instacart’s network of more than a thousand national, regional and local grocery retailers directly through Grubhub’s app and web site.