- Instacart now offers full shopping and Instant Checkout right inside ChatGPT
- The integration allows users to go from meal ideas to paid, scheduled grocery delivery without leaving the chat
- Instacart is positioning the feature as the start of a larger shift toward AI-powered, conversational commerce
Instacart has launched the first fully integrated grocery shopping app in ChatGPT. You can use the new Instant Checkout system to find items, put together a basket and pay for everything without ever leaving the chat window. It’s the first time any retailer in ChatGPT’s growing app ecosystem has put the entire purchase flow together end-to-end, and it positions Instacart as the earliest mover in what promises to be the next phase of AI-powered commerce.
The rollout means that ChatGPT no longer just suggests meals or comes up with recipe ideas. The AI chatbot can perform the entire shopping round. A call as simple as “Instacart, help me make meatloaf” starts the process. Simply log into your Instacart account and the app pulls inventory from nearby stores and makes shopping suggestions. Then you pay via ChatGPT using Stripe. The delivery then takes place via Instacart as usual.
“With the Instacart app directly in ChatGPT, users can go from meal planning to checkout in a single, seamless conversation,” OpenAI’s head of ChatGPT, Nick Turley, said in a statement. “It’s another step towards bringing our vision to life – where AI delivers useful suggestions and connects directly to real-world services, saving people time and effort in their everyday lives.”
Instant Checkout currently works on desktop and mobile web, with iOS and Android support coming soon. Once enabled, the user stays inside the chat, selects items tailored for local availability, and checks out using a familiar, secure credit card interface. Everything is powered behind the scenes by the Agentic Commerce Protocol, which OpenAI developed to allow apps inside ChatGPT to perform transactions.
Grocery shopping is one of the most universal errands in modern life, equal parts duty and necessity. Embedding this experience in an AI chatbot could change the way people think about planning, buying and preparing meals. If ChatGPT already helps someone brainstorm weekly dinners, now it also removes the moment when intention and follow-through often break down.
Instacart’s catalog contains a few billion items, and its inventory is constantly updated. These complexities are exactly why grocery shopping has been such a difficult category for AI agents like ChatGPT to crack. But Instacart relies on a decade of fulfillment data and its delivery logistics to make the difference.
A conversational shopping assistant is only as good as the data underneath it. If a model recommends a brand that isn’t actually in stock, or offers the wrong size, or ignores a user’s preference for gluten-free or organic products, trust is lost.
Instacart’s pitch is that its system understands these nuances and that ChatGPT can provide the conversational glue to get a successful order placed. It can start with a single recipe and a lazy evening where ChatGPT picks the ingredients and takes care of the logistics. But if convenience doesn’t have too many bumps in the road to a meal, people could start thinking of ChatGPT as their personal shopper middleman, with the actual Instacart shopper picking up their groceries.
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