AI Goes Grocery Shopping: Instacart’s David McIntosh

SPEAKER_1 (0:02)

What if your grocery cart remembered what you forgot before you did? On today's episode, we talked to one tech leader using physical AI to improve the grocery shopping experience.

David McIntosh (0:13)

I'm David McIntosh at Instacart, and you're listening to Me, Myself, and AI.

Sam Ransbotham (0:19)

Welcome to Me, Myself, and AI, a podcast from MIT Sloan Management Review, exploring the future of artificial intelligence. I'm Sam Ransbotham, Professor of Analytics at Boston College. I've been researching data, analytics, and AI at MIT SMR since 2014, with research articles, annual industry reports, case studies, and now 13 seasons of podcast episodes.

In each episode, corporate leaders, cutting-edge researchers, and AI policymakers join us to break down what separates AI hype from AI success.

My guest today is David McIntosh, Chief Connected Stores Officer at Instacart. Instacart is a grocery delivery and technology company. David runs the in-store side, the smart carts and software that grocery stores themselves buy and use. Before this, David built Tenor, the GIF search engine inside iMessage and WhatsApp that Google bought. So he's gone from helping people find the right GIF, to putting cameras and AI on shopping carts. He argues that grocery is one of the hardest places there is to make AI actually work. Dave, thanks for being here.

David McIntosh (1:29)

Thanks for having me. Great to be here.

Sam Ransbotham (1:31)

I can already tell that I have offended you though. So let's get right down into it. Is it GIF or GIF?

David McIntosh (1:37)

When I was running Tenor, we joked that we would hire both types of people. I can tell you a funny story. Often in parties, I will use the word GIF because maybe it was a couple months after we launched the product. I was at a dinner party that a friend was hosting, and everybody was going around the table talking about what they were working on. The person next to me just couldn't quite understand that this was a GIF company, not a GIFT company. He was asking me all kinds of questions around, how do you compete with Amazon? I just was puzzled. Then finally, it dawned on me, oh, he was thinking GIFT with a T the entire time.

Generally, my rule of thumb is if it's a loud, noisy room, I'll use the GIF. It's very hard to confuse that for GIFT. But in other settings, I use GIFT.

Sam Ransbotham (2:19)

So both ways. Now as I think about it, we might have more trouble today because GIFT might be confusing with peanut butter if we're talking about grocery stores. So I don't know, they're just land binds everywhere.

Let's bypass all that and just get down to the real part. What are connected stores and what's a Capricart?

David McIntosh (2:36)

Certainly. With connected store, what we're really doing is taking the convenience and the personalization that our users love about the online experience and we're bringing it into the store. Increasingly, we were hearing from our retailers that we had helped bring them online. The last decade of Instacart's history, we brought their business online with e-commerce solutions, fulfillment solutions, retail media solutions, and they were coming to us saying, hey, Instacart, you brought my business online in the last decade. How can you help me in store? I'm trying to drive more omni-channel customer behavior. I'm trying to drive new retail media revenue. Can you help me with these problems that I'm facing in the store?

And then on the other side, a lot of our users were coming to us and saying, Instacart, I love shopping online, but I also go to the store. And so that was really the key insight that birthed Connected Stores a couple years ago. Our vision is that on a 5-10 year horizon, customers won't have to choose between shopping in store and online. It will be one single unified mode, all powered by Instacart.

Now, how are we building it? You asked about Caper earlier. The way we think about it is that we want to digitize all aspects of the store. The shopping experience with Caper, the deli and the perimeter counter with FoodStorm, the software, the shelf tags, the ESL tags that sit on the shelf with our pick-to-light technology that makes it easier for shoppers to find things, digitize planning for the store with our in-store mode, digitize inventory in the store with our shelf intelligence solutions, and really connect all of these technologies together.

Our approach is that the technologies have to be modular.

We don't go to retailers and say, hey, you should adopt all these six products at once. That wouldn't work, obviously. A retailer can start with, for example, a food store in which digitizes the deli and then ladder their way up to other products. All of these solutions connect to each other and reinforce each other. Then to your question around Caper. Caper was an acquisition we made a number of years ago and it's a smart shopping cart. Think about it as a traditional shopping cart that all of us have used many, many, many times throughout our life. But with a digital screen, camera sensors, the entire baskets of scales, you can weigh produce in the scale, location sensors, so the cart knows where it's at, side-facing cameras so it could understand what's on the shelf, as well as an NVIDIA Jetson board on every single cart that's running all of the sensor fusion and other AI algorithms at the edge. Really what we're seeing with Caper is that it transforms the shopping experience for users in the store. As you put things in the cart, it keeps track of your running total. You can clip coupons, find deals, very, very popular capabilities. You can bag as you go.