Uber Eats Launches AI Assistant to Build Grocery Carts Instantly
"Users were telling us they wanted a quicker way to shop. Cart Assistant helps you get from idea to checkout in seconds"
On February 11, 2026, Uber Eats announced the beta launch of "Cart Assistant," an AI-powered personal shopper feature designed to automate the traditionally manual process of grocery cart creation.
The tool is immediately accessible in the Uber Eats app at major U.S. grocers including Albertsons, Aldi, CVS, Kroger, Safeway, Sprouts Farmers Market, Walgreens, and Wegmans, with plans for broader rollout.
Users simply search for a store, tap the distinctive purple Cart Assistant icon, and provide inputs. The AI intelligently populates the basket while accounting for real-time inventory availability, item prices, and applicable promotions. Personalization draws from order history to prioritize "usuals" like preferred milk brands or oatmeal varieties, making the process feel intuitive and tailored.
Uber's Chief Technology Officer, Praveen Neppalli Naga, emphasized the customer-centric origins in the announcement blog saying, "Users were telling us they wanted a quicker way to shop, and we know how precious your time is. Cart Assistant helps you get from idea to checkout in seconds."
The feature supports extensive customization, allowing shoppers to swap brands, add extras, or remove items before final review and checkout. Uber cautions that, like all generative AI, it may occasionally glitches, urging users to verify carts.
The online grocery growth has reached $128.6 billion in 2025, a 23.2% year-over-year increase from $104.4 billion in 2024, per Digital Commerce 360 data. Instacart led with its 2023 ChatGPT-powered search for personalized recommendations, while DoorDash experimented with DashAI for order acceleration. Uber and DoorDash further integrated ChatGPT in late 2025, enabling in-app menu exploration and meal planning that seamlessly transitions to carts.
A 2023 Bloomberg report foreshadowed Uber Eats' own conversational AI for budget and preference-based ordering, Cart Assistant brings that vision to fruition with agentic capabilities.
Uber's strategy extends beyond consumers to merchants, offering AI-generated menu descriptions, enhanced food photos, and review summaries to boost listings.
Uber’s CTO, Praveen Neppalli Naga, framed the launch as an "early step" in solving practical problems with agentic AI. Unlike many startups that rely purely on third-party APIs, Uber’s spokesperson Richard Foord confirmed that Cart Assistant draws on a hybrid architecture combining "publicly available LLM models" with "Uber’s own AI stack."
The strategies of Tier-1 financial institutions like Goldman Sachs and JPMorgan Chase are similar where they spent the last year with AI engineers to co-develop "digital co-workers" that combine the general reasoning of models like Claude Opus 4.6 with the banks' proprietary internal logic.
The launch arrives after the January 30, 2026, "SaaSpocalypse," a market event that saw $285 billion in market capitalization wiped off software and legal tech firms like DISCO and Thomson Reuters following Anthropic’s release of "Claude Cowork" and its 11 open-source plugins.
The panic stemmed from investor fears that AI labs would "own the workflow," displacing specialized platforms. Uber uses the same "agentic AI" workflow takeover to consumer grocery shopping.
Uber's Cart Assistant proves the "agentic tsunami" now slams consumer apps, shifting value from store inventory to the reasoning engine filling carts, letting Uber control grocery end-to-end.
This aligns with Jensen Huang’s 2026 Davos prediction that the largest economic benefit of the AI revolution will come from the "application layer," where AI changes the nature of work.
For grocers, Uber Eats offers fulfillment scale without building delivery fleets. Kroger/Albertsons leverage this when digital sales surges. Consumers gain time savings since fewer taps mean higher conversion. Naga noted that, "By grounding features in real behavior, we build intuitive tools." Early beta feedback highlights personalization as a key factor.