What It Takes to Build a Smart Shopping Cart Used by Millions | David McIntosh, Chief Connected Stores Officer, Instacart
The AI Report PodcastShow Notes
David McIntosh, Chief Connected Stores Officer at Instacart, joins Liam to explain why the company is betting on smart shopping carts instead of rewiring stores with ceiling cameras. David walks through the $350 million acquisition of Caper, how Instacart is now live in more than 100 cities with thousands of connected carts, and why the screen on the cart, not the checkout speed, turned out to be the real driver of sales lift for retailers.
David also gets into the surprisingly hard engineering problems behind a smart cart, like figuring out whether a basket is actually empty, fusing camera and scale data in real time, and building recommendations that know exactly where a shopper is standing in the store. He and Liam talk about who owns all that shopping data, what agentic AI looks like when it moves from chat into the aisle with tools like Cart Assistant, and why grocery budgets and meal planning are becoming one of the most requested AI features in the store.
Key Topics Covered
Why David left Tenor, the GIF search engine used by billions, to build Instacart's Connected Store business
The strategic bet behind unifying online and in-store grocery shopping
Why Instacart acquired Caper for $350 million instead of building smart carts in-house
The reason Instacart chose carts over ceiling cameras for in-store AI
How a simple running total and real-time coupons drive measurable sales lift
The NVIDIA Jetson hardware and multimodal sensor fusion that let the cart "see" what's in the basket
The strange edge cases in physical AI, like why "is this cart empty" is a genuinely hard question
Who owns retailer and shopper data, and how it's used to improve recommendations
Cart Assistant: how Instacart lets customers shop inside ChatGPT and directly on retailer websites
Using agentic AI to fix store operations like out-of-stock items and supplier issues
How budget-conscious meal planning became one of the most requested AI features in the store
David's answer to Liam's closing question: why he does what he does
Episode Timestamps 00:00 - Introduction and welcome 00:14 - David's path from Tenor to Instacart's Connected Store 02:01 - The bigger bet behind bringing online and in-store shopping together 05:29 - Entering the smart cart market and acquiring Caper 08:07 - Caper's scale today: 100+ cities and millions of daily sensor inputs 10:28 - How the smart cart actually drives sales lift 12:49 - Why Instacart bet on carts instead of ceiling cameras 17:33 - The unglamorous detail that makes or breaks adoption: charging 19:26 - What makes the experience sticky enough to keep customers coming back 24:41 - Inside the hardware: NVIDIA Jetson and multimodal sensor fusion 28:43 - The strange edge case behind a seemingly simple question 35:14 - Who owns the shopping data, and how retailers use it 37:30 - Agentic shopping: Cart Assistant and buying inside ChatGPT 42:16 - Using agentic AI to fix store operations, not just shopping 46:17 - Why David does what he does
Connect with David on LinkedIn: LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/mcintoshdavid/
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