Cart Assistant from Instacart: the AI-Powered Shopping Assistant Retailers Can Make Their Own

Instacart’s whitelabel Cart Assistant brings enterprise-grade, grocery-native AI to a retailer’s own storefront, fully branded and curated for their unique customer experience.

Grocery shopping is personal. What a consumer puts in their cart reflects the rhythms of their household — their dietary preferences, the meals they keep coming back to, and the new recipes they’ve been meaning to try. Consumers are actively looking to make these daily tasks easier, and an Instacart-commissioned survey conducted by The Harris Poll among more than 2,000 U.S. adults revealed that 83% of Americans say figuring out what to make for dinner causes them stress. More than two in three say they'd be interested in an AI-powered assistant that could help. Consumer appetite exists, but for retailers looking to seize the moment, building a grocery-specific, context-rich AI assistant is no easy task.

Cart Assistant from Instacart is an enterprise-grade, grocery-native AI shopping agent, available as a fully whitelabeled solution for retail partners of all sizes. Cart Assistant is powered by Instacart intelligence, the AI layer that can bring together Instacart’s extensive understanding of how grocery data, workflows, and consumers operate with foundational models, vision, physical, and agentic AI technology to deliver unmatched outcomes for the complex grocery industry. 

Cart Assistant is the only enterprise-grade, grocery-native AI shopping agent that combines conversational AI with real-time inventory, integrated fulfillment, and personalization specific to a single retailer that can be deployed as a fully white-labeled experience. And it’s now built directly into our Marketplace, available to millions of U.S. customers, with a full rollout across the U.S. and Canada planned in the coming months.

A True Grocery-Specific Shopping Partner 

Today’s consumers expect smart, conversational experiences wherever they shop. They want real answers, rooted in real inventory, not a list of links or a vague product search. They want a tool that actually knows them, their needs and preferences.

Cart Assistant is built to handle the complexity of grocery — the interplay of preferences, dietary needs, budgets, seasonal ingredients, and household dynamics — and brings personalized grocery shopping to life. Through a natural language interface embedded directly in a retailer’s storefront, customers can accomplish in seconds what used to take a significant time investment and manual browsing across multiple surfaces.

Cart Assistant understands the intent behind requests like “dinner ideas under 30 minutes” or “make me a charcuterie board that serves 8” and turns them into shoppable, in-stock recommendations that customers can add to their cart with just a tap. It learns from every interaction in a retailer’s environment, and builds an accurate picture of what each consumer wants over time.

Cart Assistant also runs a three-tiered content moderation system to ensure the agent responds appropriately across the full breadth of things consumers might ask.

Built for the Full Grocery Shopping Journey

Cart Assistant supports how people actually shop for groceries — from inspiration to checkout. Designed to give consumers a smarter, faster, more personal way to plan and shop, here’s what it can do out of the box:

• Cart Building & Reordering

• Consumers describe a goal, like “add my usual weekly groceries,” or “I need ingredients for taco night,” and Cart Assistant builds a list with in-stock products from a retailer’s catalog.

• Recipe & Meal Planning

• Cart Assistant generates personalized recipes using specialized recipe models that prioritize a retailer’s own recipe content when available, and turns any recipe into a shoppable cart with one tap.
  

• Conversational Product Discovery

• The tool supports natural language search, dietary filtering (vegan, gluten-free, high-protein, low-sodium and more), brand exploration, and product discovery through an easy-to-use and understand interface.

• List & Photo Upload

• Consumers can upload a photo of a handwritten list or a recipe, and Cart Assistant turns it into a clean, shoppable list — eliminating one of the most tedious steps in the weekly shop.

• Real-Time Intelligence

• A retailer’s instance of Cart Assistant can have live access to inventory and loyalty data, allowing consumers to understand if what they’re shopping for is in stock, and see what available loyalty rewards apply to their cart.

• Personalization that Compounds

• Cart Assistant learns preferences from past orders and conversations — brand affinities, dietary habits, favorite flavors — to deliver recommendations that get more relevant over time.
  

  

   

Fully Integrated into the Ecommerce Experience

Cart Assistant is designed to work seamlessly across every touchpoint in the grocery shopping journey — from the first moment a customer lands on a retailer’s homepage to the last item they add to cart.

Entry points appear contextually throughout the shopping journey. Customers can encounter Cart Assistant on search pages, browse pages, and product detail pages, with contextual start prompts that make it easy to engage without having to know exactly what to ask. First-time users see an onboarding flow that introduces the experience before it becomes an always-available companion across every surface.

Your Brand, Front and Center

Cart Assistant carries a retailer’s brand – not Instacart’s. A retailer’s experience is that retailer’s way of making grocery shopping easier for their customers. Every element is customizable to match a retailer’s brand identity:

Cart Assistant is a continuously improved platform product, not a model that retailers are handed and left to maintain. Every software upgrade from Instacart automatically improves the customer experience for the retailers leveraging the solution. 

Cart Assistant is also built with the data isolation and safety requirements that enterprise tooling demands. Each retailer’s Cart Assistant deployment is strictly single-retailer confined — chat history, order history, and saved preferences are scoped to that retailer’s storefront and never shared across retailer storefronts or within the Instacart Marketplace.

At its best, grocery shopping is how people take care of those they love. Cart Assistant is built around that idea: that the right technology, deployed in the right way, can take the stress out of the weekly shop and give people more time for what actually matters — time spent together. Instacart has spent over 14 years building the technology, data, and grocery intelligence that brings Cart Assistant to life. But the real work happens in partnership — because retailers know their customers best. 

Learn more HERE, or explore the AI shopping assistant currently live on the Instacart Marketplace for millions of consumers.