Instacart introduced Clementine, an AI-powered grocery shopping assistant, on Wednesday, making it available to customers across North America on the Instacart Marketplace.

The assistant converts simple messages like "I need a week of budget-friendly kid lunches," "high-protein easy dinners for two" or "order my usuals" into personalized, ready-to-buy carts. The experience draws on what is actually available on shelves in real time at the customer's chosen store.

"We've spent nearly 15 years learning how families shop and eat, and Clementine puts that knowledge to work," said Chris Rogers, CEO of Instacart. "It learns from the preferences you share and the way you've shopped on Instacart. It can help you stay on budget and surface what's actually in stock at your chosen store, handling enough of the weekly planning that the mental load actually feels lighter."

The launch targets a well-documented pain point. More than 80% of Americans say figuring out what to make for dinner causes them stress, and nearly a third say the hardest part isn't the cooking — it's deciding what to make. More than three in five say they would be interested in an AI assistant that could help.

Instacart backs Clementine with the scale of its marketplace data: over 1.6 billion lifetime orders, a catalog of more than 2 billion items, and more than 10 million daily inventory signals from nearly 100,000 stores across more than 2,200 retail banners in North America. This foundation powers the company's inventory intelligence, letting Clementine understand what's on store shelves in real time while building a picture of how families actually eat, what they buy week after week, and what's on sale at their store at any given moment.

Clementine can surface relevant deals and promotions and help customers find lower-cost alternatives. Shoppers can also photograph a handwritten shopping list, and Clementine converts it into a digital list that can be added to the cart.

Alongside the consumer assistant, Instacart announced new grocery partners for Cart Assistant, its white-label enterprise AI shopping assistant. Cart Assistant combines Instacart's grocery intelligence with the retailer's own catalog and customer data to create a branded assistant on the grocer's website and app. It surfaces relevant deals and recipes and builds carts without requiring customers to search item by item. Grocers can customize everything from the assistant's name and tone to loyalty integration and recipe content, so the experience feels entirely their own.

Food Bazaar, Heritage Grocers Group and Woodman's are now live with Cart Assistant. Aldi U.S., Harmon's, The Save Mart Companies, Stew Leonard's and additional partners will follow.

Instacart has also partnered with Anthropic, OpenAI and Google, so grocery conversations can begin on Claude, ChatGPT, Gemini or AI Mode in Google Search.

For retailers and marketers, the dual rollout signals where grocery commerce is heading: AI assistants grounded in real-time inventory data, operating both as consumer-facing tools and as white-label infrastructure that grocers can brand as their own.