What It Takes to Build a Smart Shopping Cart Used by Millions | David McIntosh, Chief Connected Stores Officer, Instacart

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