- Instacart now offers complete shopping and instant payment right in ChatGPT
- The integration allows users to go from meal ideas to paid and scheduled food deliveries without leaving the chat.
- Instacart is positioning this feature as the beginning of a broader shift toward AI-powered conversational commerce.
Instacart launched the first grocery app fully integrated with ChatGPT. The new instant checkout system allows you to search for items, create a shopping cart and pay for everything without leaving the chat window. This is the first time a retailer in ChatGPT’s growing app ecosystem brings together the entire checkout process from start to finish, positioning Instacart as the first step into the next phase of AI-powered commerce.
With this release, ChatGPT is no longer limited to suggesting meals or generating recipe ideas. The AI chatbot can do all the shopping. A simple request like “Instacart, help me make meatloaf” starts the process. All you have to do is log into your Instacart account and the app will pull inventory from nearby stores and make suggestions for your purchases. Then pay via ChatGPT with Stripe. Delivery is as usual via Instacart.
“With the Instacart app right in ChatGPT, users can go from meal planning to checkout in a single conversation,” Nick Turley, director of ChatGPT at OpenAI, said in a statement. “This is another step towards realizing our vision: to enable artificial intelligence to make useful suggestions and connect directly to real-world services, saving people time and effort in their daily lives.”
Instant Checkout currently works on desktop and mobile web, with iOS and Android support coming soon. Once activated, the user remains in the chat, selects items appropriate for local availability, and pays through a familiar and secure credit card interface. It’s all handled behind the scenes by the Agent Trading Protocol, developed by OpenAI to enable apps on ChatGPT to execute trades.
ChatGPT purchase
Shopping is one of modern life’s most universal pursuits, both an effort and a necessity. Integrating this experience into an AI-powered chatbot could change the way people think about planning, shopping and cooking. If ChatGPT already helps someone think about weeknight dinners, now it also eliminates the time when intention and execution often fail.
Instacart’s catalog contains billions of items, with constantly updated inventory. This complexity is exactly why grocery shopping is such a difficult category for AI agents like ChatGPT to solve. But Instacart relies on a decade of delivery and delivery logistics data to make a difference.
A conversational salesperson is only as good as the data it is based on. If a model recommends a brand that is actually out of stock, offers the wrong size, or ignores the user’s preference for organic or gluten-free products, that trust is lost.
Instacart’s thesis is that its system understands these nuances and that ChatGPT can act as a conversation starter for a successful order. You can start with a unique recipe and a relaxing evening where ChatGPT selects ingredients and arranges the logistics. But if there aren’t too many convenience issues on the way to a meal, people can start thinking of ChatGPT as their personal shopping facilitator, where the actual Instacart shopper picks up their groceries.