OpenAI and Instacart are launching a grocery shopping experience inside of ChatGPT, allowing customers to brainstorm meal ideas, make a grocery list, and check out, all without leaving the chat interface.
This builds upon an existing partnership between OpenAI and Instacart; more than two years ago, Instacart launched an in-app AI search tool powered by ChatGPT, which helps shoppers ask questions about what to make for dinner or how to accommodate dietary restrictions.
The relationship between OpenAI and Instacart seems to have only deepened after former Instacart CEO Fidji Simo — who was already an OpenAI board member — joined the company as the CEO of Applications in May.
Agentic commerce — the use of AI tools to do shopping research and make purchases on a user’s behalf — is a current priority for OpenAI. Its most recent dev day focused on its plan to build apps into ChatGPT. In an early preview for developers, ChatGPT launched integrations with apps like Booking.com, Canva, Coursera, Expedia, Figma, Spotify, and Zillow; since then, OpenAI has announced further partnerships with Target, Intuit, and others.
Leading up to this year’s holiday shopping season, both OpenAI and Perplexity announced in-app features that help users make decisions about what products to buy — so, you could ask ChatGPT to help you find the best deal on a gaming laptop that matches your specific criteria. Adobe predicted that AI-assisted online shopping will grow by 520% this holiday season.
Despite ChatGPT’s immense popularity, OpenAI is not making a profit, and it may not for another several years — if it ever does. Its products are so resource-intensive that even subscription costs don’t account for how much compute power the company uses to make its product work. These agentic commerce tools could give OpenAI another way of making money, since it’ll take an undisclosed “small fee” when it helps merchants make a sale. But it would take a whole lot of ChatGPT-based shopping for these fees to make a dent in OpenAI’s debt.
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