It can recommend recipes with ingredient lists that you can quickly add to your cart.
Instacart has launched Clementine, its own AI shopping assistant, which it says was designed to tackle the most difficult aspects of shopping: deciding what to cook while staying on budget. Clementine, which is now available across North America on Instacart Marketplace, understands natural language like other AI chatbots. You can tell it that you need to “make an easy, high-protein dinner for two,” and it will respond with a recipe along with a list of items you can add to your cart with a tap.
The company says Clementine’s answers will be based on what’s currently available at your store of choice, so you won’t end up considering a recipe you can’t get ingredients for. If you already have certain items in the ingredient list, you can remove them before adding the rest to your cart. Clementine can also make suggestions based on the choices you set in its preference center. For example, you can ask it to only suggest nut-free, vegetarian, or gluten-free recipes to ensure it recommends foods your household can actually eat.
Besides helping you decide what’s for dinner, you can also use Clementine to quickly shop for your basic items. If you ask it to restock your pantry or shop for your usual products, it will take information from your previous orders to present you with a list that you can quickly add to cart and pay for. And if you like to write down your shopping list by hand, you can take a photo and ask Clementine to turn it into a list of items that you can add directly to your cart. That said, you might want to check out the assistant’s suggestions: Instacart says orders placed with Clementine typically exceed its average cart size of $115, likely because it’s so easy to just pay for everything she recommends.
Although Clementine is Instacart’s AI chatbot, it’s not the only one that works with its system. In recent months, the company has partnered with technology companies to integrate grocery shopping with ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini or AI Mode in Google search.
