Instacart did it this morning. Uber Eats did it earlier this year. DoorDash too. And now Shipt, Target’s same-day delivery platform, is throwing its hat into the AI shopping assistant ring. The company announced a new tool called “Ask Shipt” that takes a text prompt or even a photo and turns it into a ready-to-buy cart. No more aimless scrolling. No more forgetting the sour cream.
The feature works pretty much how you’d hope. You type something like “build a cart for a Saturday tailgate for 25 people, include some brunch items” and Ask Shipt populates your cart based on that. You can get specific about your budget too. Ask for a weeknight dinner for a family of five under $35, and it’ll work within that. That’s genuinely useful, not just a flashy demo feature.
But the most interesting part is the photo upload option. Snap a picture of a dish you saw at a restaurant or spotted on Instagram, and Ask Shipt will identify the ingredients and add them to your cart. If that works reliably in practice, it’s one of those features that actually changes how people shop rather than just dressing up the existing experience.
Ask Shipt is available right now in the Shipt app and on Shipt.com. No waitlist, no phased rollout announced.
So why does this matter beyond one more app adding an AI chatbot? Because the grocery delivery space is clearly moving toward a model where the app doesn’t just fulfill a list, it helps you build one. That’s a meaningful shift. Right now most people open a delivery app already knowing what they want. These tools are designed to catch the other moments, the “I have no idea what to cook tonight” moments, and keep you inside one ecosystem rather than Googling recipes and then manually searching for ingredients.
For Shipt specifically, this also fits into a bigger push at Target. The retailer has already added AI-powered photo search, customer review summaries, and other personalized features to Target.com. Ask Shipt feels like an extension of that same strategy, pulling AI deeper into the shopping experience across both platforms.
The features Ask Shipt supports at launch include:
- Natural language cart building based on occasion, group size, or meal type
- Budget-based shopping suggestions
- Photo-to-cart ingredient identification from restaurant dishes or online food photos
- Personalized meal and snack planning for things like school lunches or after-school snacks
The real question is execution. AI shopping assistants have a habit of looking great in press releases and then hallucinating weird substitutions or missing obvious items in real use. Instacart’s Clementine launched the same day, which means consumers now have multiple options to compare side by side. That kind of competition is good. It’ll push all of these platforms to actually get the accuracy right rather than shipping something half-baked.
Shipt has a shot here. The Target connection gives it a massive product catalog to pull from, and same-day delivery is already its core strength. If Ask Shipt can reliably turn a casual prompt into a cart worth checking out, that’s a real edge. We’ll see if it holds up once real users start throwing curveballs at it.