Instacart's New AI Could Make The Tough Food Choices For You

Artificial intelligence is slowly integrating itself into every facet of modern-day life. AI programs can be used to write, problem solve, create art, and now, help customers with their grocery shopping. On March 31, 2023, popular food delivery app Instacart announced Ask Instacart. The program is not only helpful for answering questions as the name suggests — it also provides personalized recommendations based on learned preference and dietary needs, and it teams up with 80,000 stores to help shoppers find exactly what they're looking for no matter what location they're ordering from. Furthermore, it can help families decide what to cook for dinner, which would be a helpful feature all on its own.

Ask Instacart is capable of suggesting preparation and cooking methods, pairing main dishes with side items, and recommending similar ingredients when the store doesn't have what you need on hand. This news comes after a collaboration with ChatGPT that launched earlier this year, which required a subscription to the AI site. The new features are the first of many the company has planned. Soon, the food delivery service will be paired with Microsoft Bing and Google Bard on top of the plug-in already offered for ChatGPT users. Though relatively new, it's likely the Instacart initiative will improve alongside the evolution of AI programs.

The goal of Ask Instacart is to help customers use familiar language that mimics that of an actual person. Typically, search engines rely on keywords to find the answers consumers are looking for. Instacart aims to use AI technology in a responsible manner to answer shoppers' questions quickly and effectively. With more than a billion listed products and the ability to learn, Ask Instacart's goal of improving the food delivery service seems to have been accomplished already.

For those who are unfamiliar, programs such as ChatGPT learn human behavior by paying attention to common patterns and carefully analyzing data and algorithms. Artificial intelligence systems are processing this information constantly, and eventually, scientists are hoping it will match human function.

As Ask Instacart gets to know the person using it, it will be clever enough to propose personalized items as mentioned before. For now, it's made specifically to answer "food-related questions," and it will be available for consumers in the United States and Canada in the following weeks. Instacart isn't new to innovation; in the past, it released other technology that could change grocery shopping forever.