Instacart CEO Chris Rogers told Groceryshop 2026 attendees in Las Vegas on Tuesday that AI will reshape grocery more than any technology shift to date — and that grocery will be the retail category AI transforms most.

"I believe that AI is going to transform grocery more than any other technology shift to date," Rogers said during his opening-day keynote. "And I also think that grocery is going to be the category out of every retail category that's most transformed by AI. That's my belief."

Rogers framed the problem AI can solve as one of daily friction. Every household juggles personal preferences, dietary needs, price, brand loyalties, home inventory, store availability, promotions and the demands of picky family members at dinner. The result is a stressful daily experience.

"Up until now ... we're really just giving the app to the consumer and they're doing all the work," Rogers said.

AI changes that equation, in his view. Rogers said the technology will "massively simplify the grocery experience" by anticipating needs and removing the friction from meal planning. Instead of adding items one by one to a cart, shoppers will describe what they need for a meal and AI will handle the rest.

"It already understands all of the context behind that," he said. "It understands your family's preferences. It understands your budget ... so now you are building a cart in seconds."

Rogers also took direct aim at online product markups. Customers are gravitating toward value, he said, and retailers that avoid markups online are capturing more business as a result. On Instacart specifically, retailers without markups are growing on average 10 percentage points faster than the norm.

"The cost of losing sales and share over time to some of the largest digital players might be greater than the cost of removing markups today," Rogers said.

Instacart has also drawn value-seeking shoppers with lower-cost options such as pickup and no-rush delivery.

For retailers, Rogers prescribed leverage over building. He encouraged them to take advantage of the technology and the investments Instacart has already made rather than constructing their own systems, then redirect the cost savings into affordability, loyalty programs or consumer marketing.

Online grocery still has substantial room to grow, Rogers noted. Partnerships with platforms like Anthropic, OpenAI and Gemini will help increase penetration, but retailers themselves must ensure the best agentic experiences live on their own channels.

"And to do that, we need to make sure that we're retaining our valuable data and we're putting that data to work," Rogers said.

The message to grocery executives was clear: the retailers that pair AI capabilities with first-party data — and drop the markups — will define the next phase of online grocery growth.