Instacart has launched Clementine, its own AI shopping assistant, which it says was designed to tackle the hardest parts of grocery shopping: deciding what to cook while staying within budget. Clementine, which is now available across North America on the Instacart Marketplace, understands natural language like other AI chatbots. You can tell it that you need “to make a high-protein easy dinner for two,” and it will respond with a recipe that comes with a list of items you can add to your cart with a tap. 

The company says Clementine’s responses will be based on what’s currently available in your chosen store location, so you won’t end up considering a recipe that you can’t get ingredients for. If you already have some items in the ingredients list, you can remove them before adding the rest to your cart. Clementine can also make suggestions based on the choices you set in its preference center. For example, you can tell it to suggest only nut-free, vegetarian or gluten-free recipes to make sure it recommends food your household can actually eat. 

In addition to helping you decide what’s for dinner, you can also use Clementine to quickly shop for your staple items. If you tell it to restock your pantry or to shop your usuals, it will take information from your previous orders to present you a list that you can swiftly add to cart and pay for. And if you like jotting down your grocery list by hand, you can take a photo and have Clementine turn it into an item list you can add straight to your cart. That said, you may want to review the assistant’s suggestions checking out: Instacart says orders placed with Clementine typically exceed its $115 average basket size, probably because it’s so easy just paying for everything it recommends. 

While Clementine is Instacart’s own AI chatbot, it’s not the only one that works with its system. Over the past few months, the company has teamed up with tech companies to bring grocery integration to ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini or AI Mode in Google Search.