Instacart has added Clementine, a conversational AI-powered grocery shopping assistant, to its platform. The tool, announced by the company on Wednesday, turns users’ chats, shopping lists or recipes into carts ready for purchase. Users can ask Clementine for a weeklong list of budget-friendly children’s lunches, easy high-protein dinners for two, or an order of their usual products.
Clementine can create personalized recipes or offer recipes from trusted publishers. It tailors its recommendations to households’ preferences and dietary needs, such as gluten-free, vegetarian, nut-free or organic diets. It can also suggest lower-cost alternatives while showing relevant discounts and promotions. Users can upload a photo of a handwritten list or a screenshot of a digital list and turn it into a cart.
Instacart’s move comes after Uber Eats and DoorDash launched similar AI assistants. The delivery apps are thus aiming to become tools users turn to for shopping and meal planning, rather than merely places to find and purchase products; they are trying to keep users on their own apps instead of chatbots such as ChatGPT.
Instacart CEO Chris Rogers said the company had been learning about families’ shopping and eating habits for approximately 15 years, and that Clementine draws on this experience. The assistant is now available in the United States and Canada.
Why it matters
This move stands out as part of the competition expanding the role of grocery apps from product delivery to meal planning. By combining factors such as budget, dietary preferences and recipes in a single workflow, Clementine centralizes in-app activities, particularly for households that plan their shopping decisions in advance. Similar initiatives by Uber Eats and DoorDash show that the companies are trying to meet users’ shopping-related needs on their own platforms rather than leave them to chatbots. The limited availability in the United States and Canada shows that this shift is, for now, restricted to users in those markets. The question that remains is the extent to which users will prefer assistants in delivery apps over general-purpose chatbots.