Let an AI build your grocery cart and, it turns out, you spend more. Instacart says orders placed through Clementine — its new AI shopping assistant, launched Tuesday — contain more items and exceed its $115 average basket. Shipt shipped a near-identical feature the same day and pitched it as relief from “mental load.” Two grocery platforms, one day, one conclusion: the assistant isn’t just convenient, it’s a bigger receipt.

What Clementine does

Clementine turns a prompt or a photo into a cart. Tell it what’s for dinner, or snap a picture of a recipe, and it assembles the items, substitutes intelligently and hands you a basket to approve. It draws on an unusually deep data moat: more than 1.6 billion lifetime orders, a catalogue of over 2 billion items, and more than 10 million daily inventory signals from 100,000 stores across 2,200-plus retail banners. That is why it can pick the right brand at the right store rather than a generic list.

Why the basket grows

The mechanism is simple. A human shopping from a list buys the list. An assistant building a meal buys the meal — the sides, the garnish, the thing you forgot — and it’s good at suggesting the adjacent item you didn’t think to add. Instacart’s own framing is that Clementine baskets are larger than the $115 average; the quiet implication is that the assistant is also the most effective merchandising surface the company has ever shipped.

The question underneath

That surface is where the scrutiny will land. When an AI decides which brand goes in your cart, the line between “helpful substitution” and paid placement gets thin, and both Instacart and Shipt run retail-media businesses that sell exactly that influence. Neither platform has said an assistant’s picks are ad-free. For shoppers, Clementine is a genuine time-saver; for brands, it may be the new shelf. The basket-size number is the proof that the shelf works.

Written for Red Robot with AI assistance and human editing. Based on reporting by The Next Web and Instacart.