Instacart customers deciding what to make for dinner or what to purchase for a weekend cookout will now be able to solicit advice from an AI assistant.
The company on Wednesday launched its new “Ask Instacart” feature, which uses OpenAI‘s GPT technology and Instacart’s own AI models to suggest products in response to questions about, for example, which herbs to include in roasted potatoes, or what sorts of snacks to buy for a movie night.
Ask Instacart, which is slated to expand to all of the food delivery company’s U.S. and Canada customers within the coming weeks, lets users type questions into the existing search bar to find items from Instacart’s 80,000-plus retail partner locations.
“Search has always been the most important app for the internet,” says JJ Zhuang, chief architect at Instacart. “This is why we want to start from search.”
Now, rather than having to search for ingredients one by one as they’ve often historically done, customers will be able to suggest what they’re generally aiming to do, letting Instacart surface relevant items they can tap into their carts.
In a demo for Fast Company, a query about what to buy for a summer barbecue brought up suggestions for hot dogs, hamburger meat, soda, beer, and condiments. When prompted for recommendations for stocking an office pantry, Ask Instacart recommended coffee and tea, along with sugar, cream, and snacks like granola bars and dried fruit. The tool can also suggest ingredients to meet particular needs, like dairy-free snacks for kids. Recommendations will be based on user requests, as well as their past purchase histories,
“We want to become more and more a partner to help users solve their problems,” says Zhuang, explaining the company wants to help in planning food purchases in addition to simply delivering them.
It’s not the company’s first foray into generative AI: Instacart in March debuted a plugin for OpenAI’s ChatGPT that makes it easy to purchase ingredients when the AI system is discussing food, such as if users ask it to recommend a recipe. Zhuang says he imagines both approaches will continue to prove useful, as will future AI developments he says the company has in its pipeline.
Unlike ChatGPT and similar general purpose systems, Ask Instacart is set up to politely reject off-topic questions, so users won’t be able to ask it to solve their math homework or, jokes Zhuang, write a poem about the ingredients they’re buying. But, he says, the company is eager to see the likely unanticipated questions users do ask as they’re seeing food recommendations.
“I’m sure that we will find a lot of creative ways that we haven’t currently imagined that people will ‘Ask Instacart,’” he says.
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