Shipt, the same-day delivery platform owned by Target, announced Wednesday that its new Ask Shipt tool will turn user prompts into personalized, ready-to-buy carts. The AI tool creates carts based on requests such as products for a Saturday picnic for 25 people and brunch, or easy school lunches and snacks. Users can upload a photo of a dish they saw online or at a restaurant and have its ingredients added to their cart. They can also ask for budget-friendly suggestions, such as a weekday meal for a family of five costing less than 35 dollars. Ask Shipt is now available in the Shipt app and on Shipt.com. In the race Shipt has joined, Instacart introduced Clementine this morning, while Uber Eats and DoorDash launched similar tools this year. The launch follows the addition of new AI-powered shopping features to Target.com.
Why it matters
This step adds a model of completing a purchase by describing what is needed to the existing habit of searching for products one by one in online grocery shopping. The promise of reducing the decision-making burden, particularly for large gatherings, school lunches or specific budgets, makes shopping planning a direct part of the delivery service. Functions such as extracting products from photos expand the ways users can begin shopping, while leaving open the question of how accurate and budget-compatible these recommendations are from a user experience perspective. The similar moves by Instacart, Uber Eats and DoorDash show that competition is taking place not only over delivery speed or product range, but also over artificial intelligence’s ability to turn needs into shopping carts; considered alongside the new features on Target’s website, this shows that the company is embedding this technology into different stages of the shopping process.