(Image credit: Instacart)

• Instacart now offers full shopping and Instant Checkout directly inside ChatGPT
• The integration lets users go from meal ideas to paid, scheduled grocery delivery without leaving the chat
• Instacart is positioning the feature as the start of a larger shift toward AI-powered, conversational commerce

Instacart has launched the first fully embedded grocery‑shopping app inside ChatGPT. You can use the new Instant Checkout system to find items, put together a cart, and pay for everything without ever leaving the chat window. It’s the first time any retailer in ChatGPT’s growing app ecosystem has stitched together the entire purchase flow end‑to‑end, and it positions Instacart as the earliest mover in what’s shaping up to be AI‑powered commerce’s next phase.

The rollout means that ChatGPT is no longer just suggesting meals or surfacing recipe ideas. The AI chatbot can execute the entire grocery run. A prompt as simple as “Instacart, help me make meatloaf” will start the process. You just have to sign into your Instacart account, and the app pulls up inventory from nearby stores and makes suggestions for your shopping. Then you pay through ChatGPT using Stripe. Delivery then proceeds through Instacart as normal.

"With the Instacart app directly in ChatGPT, users can go from meal planning to checkout in a single, seamless conversation," OpenAI’s head of ChatGPT, Nick Turley, said in a statement. "It’s another step toward bringing our vision to life—where AI delivers helpful suggestions and connects directly to real-world services, saving people time and effort in their everyday lives."

Instant Checkout currently works on desktop and mobile web, with iOS and Android support arriving soon. Once enabled, the user stays inside the chat, selects items tailored to local availability, and checks out with a familiar, secure credit‑card interface. Everything is powered behind the scenes by the Agentic Commerce Protocol that OpenAI developed to let apps inside ChatGPT perform transactions.

Grocery shopping is one of the most universal errands in modern life, equal parts chore and necessity. Embedding that experience inside an AI chatbot could shift the way people think about planning, buying, and making meals. If ChatGPT already helps someone brainstorm weekly dinners, it now also removes the moment where intention and follow‑through often break down.

Instacart’s catalog includes a couple of billion items with its inventory updating constantly. These complexities are exactly why grocery shopping has been such a difficult category for AI agents like ChatGPT to crack. But, Instacart is relying on a decade of fulfillment data and its delivery logistics to make the difference.

A conversational shopping assistant is only as good as the data beneath it. If a model recommends a brand that’s not actually in stock, or offers the wrong size, or ignores a user’s preference for gluten‑free or organic products, that trust evaporates.

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Instacart’s pitch is that its system understands those nuances and that ChatGPT can supply the conversational glue to get a successful order placed. It may start with a single recipe and a lazy evening where ChatGPT picks the ingredients and handles the logistics. But if the convenience doesn’t have too many bumps on the road to a meal, people could start thinking of ChatGPT as their personal shopper intermediary with the actual Instacart shopper picking up their groceries.

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Eric Hal Schwartz is a freelance writer for TechRadar with more than 15 years of experience covering the intersection of the world and technology. For the last five years, he served as head writer for Voicebot.ai and was on the leading edge of reporting on generative AI and large language models. He’s since become an expert on the products of generative AI models, such as OpenAI’s ChatGPT, Anthropic’s Claude, Google Gemini, and every other synthetic media tool. His experience runs the gamut of media, including print, digital, broadcast, and live events. Now, he’s continuing to tell the stories people want and need to hear about the rapidly evolving AI space and its impact on their lives. Eric is based in New York City.