OpenAI and Instacart Add Grocery Shopping to ChatGPT: A New Future?

Shopping for groceries may be the next everyday task to disappear into a chat window as on December 8, OpenAI and Instacart announced a new grocery shopping experience built directly into ChatGPT, letting customers brainstorm meal ideas, generate a grocery list, browse items, and complete checkout without leaving the conversation. 

Instead of hopping between recipe sites, notes apps, and a delivery service, the pitch is one continuous flow: ask what to cook, get suggestions, and immediately buy what you need through Instacart, all in the same interface. OpenAI’s Nick Turley framed it as a step toward AI that not only recommends but also connects to real-world services, aiming to save time and effort in day-to-day routines (YahooTech).

This move also extends a relationship that has been developing for years. More than two years ago, Instacart introduced an in-app AI search tool powered by ChatGPT to help people answer practical questions like what to make for dinner or how to shop around dietary restrictions. And the partnership appears to have tightened further after Fidji Simo, former Instacart CEO and already an OpenAI board member, joined OpenAI in May as CEO of Applications. That timing matters because OpenAI has been openly prioritizing what it calls “agentic commerce,” where AI tools do research and can carry a purchase through to completion on a user’s behalf (Mashable).

The Instacart integration sits inside a broader push to turn ChatGPT into a hub for apps and services. OpenAI’s recent developer event emphasized building app-like integrations into ChatGPT, and early previews included connections to services such as Booking.com, Canva, Coursera, Expedia, Figma, Spotify, and Zillow, with additional partnerships later announced with companies like Target and Intuit. The direction is clear: conversational interfaces are being positioned not just as places to ask questions, but as places to take action. In the lead-up to the holiday season, OpenAI and Perplexity both rolled out features aimed at helping users decide what to buy, including queries like finding the best deal on a gaming laptop that matches specific criteria. Adobe even projected that AI-assisted online shopping would grow by 520% this holiday season (Mashable).

Still, turning meal planning into one-click checkout raises a familiar concern: AI can be confidently wrong. Mashable notes that ChatGPT-generated recipes have a mixed online reputation, and that hallucinations can creep into cooking instructions and ingredient choices. The article points to a stark reminder from August 2025, when a person was reportedly hospitalized after following ChatGPT dietary advice that suggested replacing table salt with sodium bromide, which is toxic for human consumption. The takeaway is not that people should avoid the feature, but that they should treat AI suggestions like a rough draft, especially when food, allergies, or health considerations are involved. If ChatGPT helps create your cart, it is still wise to review the list carefully before you buy, particularly during the rush of holiday hosting (Mashable).

For OpenAI, there is also a business reason to make shopping native to the chat. Despite ChatGPT’s scale, OpenAI is not currently profitable, and its products are expensive to run, with subscription revenue not fully covering the compute required to power them (Mashable). Agentic commerce offers another potential revenue stream: OpenAI says it will take a small, undisclosed fee when it helps merchants make a sale, though it would take a very large volume of ChatGPT-driven purchases for that to meaningfully offset the company’s financial pressures. If the experience feels seamless and trustworthy enough, ordering groceries in a chatbot could become normal. If it feels error-prone or pushy, it may remain a novelty. Either way, the line between “asking” and “buying” in AI is getting thinner, and grocery shopping is now officially part of that experiment (YahooTech).

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Works Cited

Silberling, Amanda. “You Can Buy Your Instacart Groceries Without Leaving ChatGPT.” TechCrunch, 8 Dec. 2025, https://techcrunch.com/2025/12/08/you-can-buy-your-instacart-groceries-without-leaving-chatgpt/. 

“You Can Buy Your Instacart Groceries Without Leaving ChatGPT.” Yahoo Tech, https://tech.yahoo.com/ai/chatgpt/articles/buy-instacart-groceries-without-leaving-175953836.html.

“You Can Now Buy Groceries in ChatGPT.” Mashable, https://mashable.com/article/chatgpt-grocery-delivery-instacart. 

Bass, Dina. “OpenAI Makes ChatGPT Available for Companies to Integrate in Apps.” Bloomberg, 1 Mar. 2023, https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2023-03-01/openai-makes-chatgpt-available-for-companies-to-integrate-in-apps 

Zhuang, JJ. “Introducing the Instacart Plugin for ChatGPT.” Instacart, 6 Apr. 2023, https://www.instacart.com/company/updates/instacart-chatgpt/