Instacart’s Three-Year Growth High Comes Amid AI Expansion
The company says productivity gains across engineering teams paralleled stronger transaction volume and margin expansion
Instacart closed 2025 with its strongest growth in three years. Gross transaction value rose 14% year over year to $9.85 billion, orders increased 16% to 89.5 million, and adjusted EBITDA grew 20% to $303 million, according to the company’s fourth-quarter earnings release and call. Instacart CEO Chris Rogers told investors the company is guiding to 11%-13% GTV growth in Q1 2026, describing it as the strongest year-over-year guide the company has issued since going public.
AI Is Accelerating the Machine Behind Grocery
Management repeatedly tied that momentum to artificial intelligence. The most concrete claims focused on internal productivity. Rogers said average output per engineer increased nearly 40% over the past year, with 10% of engineers increasing output by 80%. For new projects, he said AI is enabling teams to build production-grade software “more than 4 times faster than before.” He also stated that system reliability improved even as engineering throughput rose.
The most visible external outcome is enterprise expansion. Instacart launched 70 Storefront Pro partners in 2025, up from 30 the prior year. The company now powers more than 380 grocery e-commerce sites. Rogers described enterprise as a “real strategic advantage,” emphasizing deeper technical integrations and joint planning with retailers, citing expanded deployments with Costco and Sprouts, along with international launches in Spain and France.
Enterprise growth influences operating efficiency. Rogers said deeper integrations increase order density and lower cost to serve through shared infrastructure. CFO Emily Reuter stated that adjusted EBITDA is expected to grow faster than GTV in 2026, although the rate of expansion will moderate as the company reinvests. In Q4, GAAP net income was $81 million, down year over year due primarily to a $60 million FTC settlement and other non-recurring expenses.
Advertising remains another area where AI is embedded into operations. Advertising and other revenue grew 10% year over year in Q4. The company now works with more than 9,000 brands, up from 7,000 a year earlier, and Carrot Ads spans more than 310 retailer-owned sites, up from 220. Rogers said AI is improving ranking, relevance, and personalization of sponsored products, and expanding automated recommendations for advertisers, including identifying where campaign targets can be adjusted to improve return on ad spend.
Instacart has also extended AI into physical retail through its Caper smart carts, which use computer vision to identify items and enable checkout without traditional registers. Caper AI was acquired in 2021 and is integrated into the company’s enterprise stack. Rogers said Instacart is live with Caper in nearly 100 cities across 15 states and recently launched shoppable display ads on carts with Wakefern. Early data cited on the call showed that a prompt (“Got everything you need?”) drove nearly a 1 percentage point lift in basket size on average.
The Consumer AI Moment Is Still Early
Consumer-facing generative AI remains earlier in its measurable impact. Instacart introduced Cart Assistant in late 2025 as part of a broader enterprise AI suite. In the company’s press release announcing the tools, Rogers said, “AI is transforming how people shop for groceries and feed their families.”
On the earnings call, he confirmed Cart Assistant is in beta testing and expected to roll out on the Marketplace by the end of Q1 2026.
The company also integrated grocery checkout directly into OpenAI’s ChatGPT interface. Rogers said Instacart was “the first grocery partner to launch native checkout directly on ChatGPT.” He added that referral traffic from generative AI platforms remains “not material at this point in time.”
AI experimentation has also carried risk. In late 2025, Instacart tested algorithmic pricing variations that showed different prices to different users. The company halted the test following public criticism and regulatory scrutiny.
Read more: Why AI Pricing Broke Down in Grocery Retail
Throughout the call, Rogers emphasized the role of proprietary grocery data. Instacart has processed more than 1.6 billion lifetime orders. “Our physical operations make our data better, and that data makes our technology smarter,” he said.
The earnings results show growth and margin expansion occurring alongside reported productivity gains. Enterprise rollouts accelerated. Advertising partnerships expanded. Consumer-facing AI tools remain in early rollout stages. The clearest near-term effect of AI appears in development speed and operational execution rather than direct revenue from generative interfaces.
Instacart ended 2025 with approximately $1 billion in cash and similar assets and repurchased $1.4 billion of shares during the year, including $1.1 billion in Q4. Management expects continued GTV growth and EBITDA expansion in 2026.