Shipt enters the AI shopping assistant race with Ask Shipt

Target-owned delivery platform Shipt launched Ask Shipt yesterday, an AI shopping assistant that turns natural-language prompts into checkout-ready carts. The announcement landed the same morning Instacart unveiled its counterpart, Clementine, while Uber Eats and DoorDash have already rolled out similar features this year.

The tool lets users type requests such as "create a cart for a 25-person tailgate party on Saturday and include brunch items" or "build a cart for easy school lunches and after-school snacks." It can also analyze a photo of a dish the user snapped at a restaurant or on social media, identify the ingredients, and add them automatically. Budget limits are supported too — users can ask for a family-of-five dinner under $35.

The launch follows Target's own integration of AI-powered visual search, customer-review summaries, and personalized shopping experiences on its website. Shipt effectively serves as the retailer's logistics execution layer, and the new tool closes the loop between product discovery and final delivery.

Ask Shipt is live now in the Shipt app and at Shipt.com. The company has not released performance metrics or early adoption data, nor has it disclosed whether the assistant runs on an internally developed language model or through a partnership with an external provider.