Dive Brief:
- As more consumers use AI to help them shop for groceries, many major retailers are relying on Instacart as their main avenue to the fast-evolving shopping capability, according to a report from AI enablement firm AstraWorks.
- The firm’s AI shopping benchmark, which incorporates observations gathered across two dozen retailers last month, found that most don’t have their own AI shopping tools or their own direct link with AI shopping agents like ChatGPT and Claude. Of the 18 grocers shoppable through ChatGPT, 16 are connected to it via Instacart’s integration.
- Despite Instacart’s early advantage, AstraWorks’ report noted that retailers like Albertsons and Wegmans are forging unique paths for AI shopping.
Dive Insight:
Just as it did with e-commerce more than a decade ago, Instacart has jumped out ahead as a key service provider for grocers navigating yet another potentially transformative shopping capability.
The grocery tech company launched its ChatGPT integration tool in December, and for many retailers that represents the main AI shopping capability available in these early days of agentic commerce, according to the report. AstraWorks’ report lists 11 retailers — including Publix, Schnuck Markets, H-E-B and Ahold Delhaize USA — as “platform-dependent” for AI shopping capabilities.
“These retailers have little or no onsite capability, and most of their external agent presence is carried by Instacart,” the report noted. “Take the Instacart integration away and most of their agentic commerce score goes to near zero.”
AstraWorks noted this sort of third-party integration comes with trade-offs for retailers.
“A retailer that reaches AI shoppers through Instacart has a working path to the consumer, but less control over the interface, intelligence layer, data capture, and long-term differentiation,” the report stated.
This dynamic echoes a similar one grocers navigated as they became increasingly reliant on Instacart for online sales. Ultimately, many major retailers continued to rely on the tech provider — as well as competitors like DoorDash and Uber — while also building their own websites, pickup services and other capabilities.
AstraWorks ranked the 24 retailers according to their agentic AI shopping capabilities across factors like whether or not retailers had proprietary AI shopping tools, the presence of AI shopping assistants on websites and apps, and integrations with third-party AI agents like ChatGPT. Amazon unsurprisingly took the top spot with a score of 63 out of 100. Walmart scored second with a 49, while Albertsons and Wegmans tied for third with 38. Most retailers scored 10-24 points on the index, earning them the designation of “starters” in AI shopping by AstraWorks.
Wegmans earned a higher score than many other grocers because it uses an AI assistant powered by Cooklist and is also integrated with Instacart’s ChatGPT tool. Albertsons, meanwhile, has built its own AI shopping assistant and also has direct connections with Claude, Gemini and Perplexity.
Whole Foods Market, notably, only scored 9 points while discount retailers Trader Joe’s, Dollar General and WinCo Foods rounded out the bottom three.
As grocers navigate AI as a tool for both their shoppers and their internal operations, they face difficult decisions over who to partner with and whether they can build capabilities on their own. Building proprietary tools is expensive but helps retailers control the experience and retain valuable data that can further advance AI capabilities, while partnerships can help retailers ramp up quickly but can mean losing control of valuable data.
“The trajectory of agentic commerce's rise as a key shopping channel is an open question in the retail industry. Whether it remains largely a discovery surface or quickly gives rise to a significant share of automated transactions is an active debate,” the report noted.
