Instacart is now available in Claude

How Instacart's grocery intelligence is powering the agentic AI era, one interface at a time

Powering a world-class grocery experience inside a conversational AI interface is hard. Not just because the technology is new and rapidly changing, but because grocery shopping itself is surprisingly complicated. Tens of thousands of SKUs per store. Inventory availability that can change by the minute. And household shopping preferences that are deeply personal: the retailer someone has trusted for decades, the dietary needs of their family that are non-negotiable, the preferred ripeness of their bananas. When a consumer asks an AI assistant to help them shop, there's no room for stale data or generic results. It has to be accurate, local, and reflect your preferences – or it just isn't useful.

Most AI grocery experiences fail here. They surface plausible-sounding results that don't reflect what's actually in stock, what things cost at your store today, or what your household actually buys. Getting it right requires more than a decade of grocery intelligence – rapid data pipelines into 2,200+ retail banners, a product catalog with more than 2 billion items, and a deep understanding of how families actually shop. That's what Instacart has built, and beginning today, it's available through Instacart in Claude.

When you connect to Instacart through Claude, you can now build a grocery cart right inside the conversation – from recipes, a weekly list, or a simple prompt. Claude connects to Instacart’s experience, surfacing real options from nearby stores, with live product inventory, and personalized results from your Instacart account. Any cart you build stays in sync with your Instacart account, so you can pick up where you left off in our app or on our website whenever you're ready to order.

What makes this possible is the intelligence layer Instacart has built over time. Millions of customers shopping across our platform have given us a deep understanding of how people actually buy groceries: what they substitute, what they won't, where they shop and how. We also understand how preferences shift by season, occasion, and household through Smart Shop, our personalization engine. The experience isn’t generic – with Instacart’s understanding, it reflects your stores, your staples, your preferences. And that's what you’ll see when you log in to Instacart in Claude.

Instacart is the grocery infrastructure layer for agentic AI – present wherever the journey starts, whether that's in our own app, through AI Solutions powering our retail partners' digital experiences, or with AI assistants like Claude. Think of it like the Domain Name System (DNS) for grocery commerce: the infrastructure that translates intent into action. Conversational AI can understand what you want, but without catalog depth, inventory, and fulfillment data to resolve that into something real and deliverable, it's just a conversation. We're the reason that conversation becomes a cart. Without that layer, AI can inspire a meal. With it, AI can shop for one. The interface changes – our app, a retailer's storefront, an AI assistant – but the Instacart technology underneath is the same in every case. From the first conversational prompt to a delivery at your door, that's the infrastructure we've spent years building, and it's what makes agentic grocery shopping real.

Conversational AI is becoming a primary starting point for everyday decisions. Grocery is one of the categories where getting it right matters most to people. The complexity is real, and so is the infrastructure required to handle it. Instacart has spent years building that foundation – across our platform, through our retail partners, and now woven into the AI assistants people are already using, like Claude. We're not just participating in this shift. We're the infrastructure that makes it work.

Connect Instacart to Claude on mobile and web – available now for users in the U.S. Just start a grocery ordering conversation in Claude, and you'll be prompted to connect your Instacart account. Once linked, your stores and preferences travel with you automatically.