Instacart’s AI Assistant Turns Chitchat Into Cha-Ching

Instacart’s advertising business is already one of the largest in retail media. The company generated more than $1 billion in ads and other revenue in 2025, reaching nearly 100,000 stores across more than 2,200 retail banners, Instacart said a May press release. Its existing formats already prove sponsored content can pull shoppers toward brands they weren’t specifically searching for. Recipe ads deliver 78% out-of-aisle impressions and 43% new-to-brand sales, and occasion ads drive 90% out-of-aisle impressions and 36% new-to-brand sales, according to the company’s data. That business is now extending into Cart Assistant, Instacart’s artificial intelligence (AI)-powered shopping tool.

Cart Assistant is built on more than 1.6 billion lifetime orders and live inventory data. After months of testing, it rolled out to millions of U.S. customers, with a full rollout across the U.S. and Canada planned in the coming months, Instacart said in June. Orders placed through Cart Assistant are already larger, on average, than Instacart’s industry-leading $115 average order value, according to its second-quarter earnings release. Instacart CEO Chris Rogers has called the ambition behind it “the gold standard of agentic grocery AI,” PYMNTS reported.

Instacart Is Designing Ads Specifically for AI Conversations

Instacart is testing three advertising formats built specifically for that conversational style. Sponsored recipes and occasions will let brands appear when a shopper is planning something specific, like a barbecue. Deal surfacing will bring offers directly into the conversation. Product exploration will help brands appear as a shopper is deciding between options, Marketing Dive reported, citing Ali Miller, Instacart’s general manager of advertising. Testing is planned for the second half of 2026, after Cart Assistant expands to Instacart’s full North American marketplace, Adweek reported.

That timing follows Instacart’s push to distribute Cart Assistant beyond its own app. On May 19, Instacart became the first grocery partner integrated with Google’s Gemini, letting users connect their account and build a shoppable cart through natural conversation, the company said. Grocery is especially well-suited to that kind of AI assistance because it is habitual rather than event-driven. The same brands, dietary constraints and preferred substitutions repeat week after week, giving the system consistent, learnable patterns to build on, Instacart said.

A Second Growth Engine Inside a Much Larger Race

Instacart’s advertising ecosystem already spans three parts of its business: a consumer marketplace, an enterprise platform for retailers, and the advertising layer itself, with each segment feeding growth in the others. Cart Assistant adds a new surface to that ecosystem, one built around planning and discovery rather than transaction volume alone. Because the tool moves a shopper from a single-item search toward planning an entire meal, it naturally surfaces more products per conversation than a search bar built to answer one query at a time. That gives a sponsored recommendation embedded in that conversation a chance to shape which products enter the basket in the first place.

Instacart is making that bet inside a larger shift in how AI platforms are building commerce into their own products. Google launched Universal Cart at its I/O conference in May, a single basket spanning Search, Gemini, YouTube and Gmail, with an initial checkout rollout that includes Target, Walmart, Sephora and Ulta Beauty, Stellagent reported. Amazon has consolidated its own AI shopping tools into a single assistant called Alexa for Shopping, PYMNTS reported. Google separately expanded its AI Mode search to let users connect and interact with apps, including Instacart, TechCrunch reported.

That broader race is why Instacart’s advertising bet matters beyond its own platform. Every major AI company is building toward the same goal: a shopping experience that starts with a conversation and ends with a completed purchase. Instacart’s advantage is the grocery-specific data and fulfillment infrastructure sitting underneath the AI itself.

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