Generative AI for Grocery E-Commerce

In this talk, I will illustrate how Instacart leverages multimodal Large Language Models (VLMs) to transform grocery e-commerce by solving complex challenges in catalog intelligence and fulfillment. Traditional text-based or embedding-based models struggle with the noisy, real-world data inherent in grocery retail. I will explain how we successfully deployed VLMs to handle multimodal inputs, drastically improving product matching and attribute extraction across our massive catalog. You will also learn about our practical strategies for productionizing these models, including self-reflection techniques to mitigate hallucinations and knowledge distillation to optimize for cost and latency.