Our Early Journey to Transform Instacart’s Discovery Recommendations with LLMs

Key Contributors: Moein Hasani, Hamidreza Shahidi, Trace Levinson, Guanghua Shu

Introduction

At Instacart, we are laser-focused on improving the user experience by making shopping feel easy, engaging, and personalized. Our discovery surfaces play a central role in bringing this to life. Alongside explicit Search intents, discovery is our opportunity to meet customers’ implicit needs, presenting them with the most relevant and inspiring content we have to offer. The main discovery surface within the Instacart app, referred to here as the “Shopping Hub”, is one of the most critical in this regard. This is the surface a customer lands on within the Instacart app after selecting their desired retailer, guiding them along their entire journey. What users see here shapes not just what they buy, but how intuitive and enjoyable their experience feels.