Instacart Unveils AI-Powered Features to Enhance Grocery Shopping Experience

Instacart combines AI and people power to check more items off your grocery list

The grocery delivery company unveils its new Store View and Second Store Check tools to help dispel your 'out of stock' blues. Choosing what you want to eat and prepare for all your daily meals can be challenging enough. What's worse is identifying the ingredients you need and finding those items out of stock. This becomes even more irritating when ordering online and learning the item is sold out. Instacart's latest tech looks to eradicate this issue. Also: Samsung's smart fridges can soon add items to your Instacart order On Thursday, Instacart unveiled its new Store View and Second Store Check advancements. According to the release, these tools help customers gain a more in-depth and accurate understanding of the products on their grocery store shelves by combining Instacart's integration with retail store inventory systems and the millions of weekly orders customers place. The Store View feature uses AI and computer vision to analyze footage -- taken by eligible Instacart Shoppers -- of the store shelves one aisle at a time to identify products that are in stock. What's in it for the Instacart Shopper? It's another earning opportunity for a relatively low-lift task. This feature will also help inform Instacart's predictive models, which use historical data to predict when an item will be back in stock. This is useful to the customer because if they place an order for the next day and the item is out of stock, the algorithm can predict whether it will be in stock by then and confirm in the morning. Store View will launch with some retailers in the upcoming weeks and expand to more US and Canada locations throughout 2025. Instacart also shared that in the future, its Caper Carts, AI-powered smart carts currently used for item recognition and location-based recommendations, will have outward-facing cameras that can give better and more frequent updates on store inventory. The Second Store Check feature is simple: if an item is out of stock in one store, a second shopper at another store will be asked if it is available there. Because the other person is already at the store, the feedback can be delivered in a matter of minutes. The feature will roll out across the Instacart marketplace in the coming months.

Instacart to Use AI to Check Grocery Store Inventory | PYMNTS.com

Instacart unveiled three new features that it said will increase the chances its customers will get the items they order. In the future, these features will also help Instacart's partner retailers and brands get real-time information about whether products are on the shelves, the online grocery marketplace said in a Thursday (March 27) blog post. With one new feature, Store View, Instacart shoppers will be able to earn more by taking videos of store shelves, Instacart's artificial intelligence and computer vision technology will analyze the videos to determine whether products are in stock, and then Instacart will use those findings to let customers know when an item they've ordered is likely to be available, per the post. Instacart also plans to use outward-facing cameras on its AI-powered smart carts, Caper Carts, to provide updated inventory insights, the post said. Another new feature, Second Store Check, provides a solution for instances when an item is not available at the store the customer chose. With Second Store Check, Instacart will automatically ask a second shopper to see if the item is available at a store they are already at or near, according to the post. Store View will launch with select retailers in the coming weeks and then expand to more retailers in the U.S. and Canada later in the year. Second Store Check will roll out in the coming months, the post said. "With Store View, Second Store Check and Caper Carts, we're making online grocery more reliable, helping more customers get exactly what they want, and laying a foundation to help retailers and brands get better real-time insights through our technology in the future," Instacart Chief Product Officer Daniel Danker wrote in the post. Instacart has been adapting its online grocery shopping platform to meet consumers' expectations of convenience, selection, price and speed, Instacart CEO Fidji Simo wrote in a shareholder letter released in February. On March 19, the company added new AI-powered tools that deliver more personalized grocery shopping recommendations based on the customer's habits, health goals and dietary preferences. These tools include Smart Shop technology that surfaces products more relevant to the customer, Health Tags that provide detailed nutritional information, and Inspiration Pages that provide health recommendations and shoppable recipes.