Today’s interview is with David McIntosh, who is VP and GM of Connected Stores at Instacart. David joins me today to talk about innovation in the retail space, why and how they are reaching into the physical retail domain, what they are up to, the benefits for both the customer and business and a look into the future of retail.

This interview follows on from my recent interview – If you aren’t fixing the bigger picture, then you are just putting a band-aid on the problem – Interview with Zig Serafin of Qualtrics – and is number 503 in the series of interviews with authors and business leaders who are doing great things, providing valuable insights, helping businesses innovate and delivering great service and experience to both their customers and their employees.

NOTE: Today’s episode is sponsored by Qualtrics, ahead of the annual gathering of experience leaders at Qualtrics X4 in London on June 6th. There you can hear about some of the best customer experience programmes from industry leaders and companies including Belron, Allianz and Adidas. You can register now at the Qualtrics website.

Here are the highlights of my chat with David:

• Connected Stores is Instacart’s effort to bring all the things that customers love about our online delivery experience, the personalization and convenience into the store.
• There’s a number of different product lines within connected store that all tie back to that underlying thesis.
• The first is a product called Caper Cart, which is an AI-powered shopping cart. It’s got a screen in front of the customer to deliver these delightful personalized experiences, it’s got in built sensors for things like weight and location and it makes checkout really easy.
• Connected Stores includes:

• • Scan & Pay
  • Lists/In-store mode – which enables customers to plan a trip to the store so they can create a shopping list or clip coupons on their app and then can actually take that experience and link it to products like Caper Cart in store.
  • Carrot Tags – which is a software layer on top of electronic shelf labels in the store that actually connects to the Caper Cart or e-commerce pickers in the store to help them find things on shelves more easily.
  • FoodStorm Department Orders – which is digital, deli order management system that’s associate-facing but also allows customers to order from the deli, say, continue their shopping and then get notified via the Caper Cart when their order is ready.

• What we’re doing is we’re unifying the online and in-store experience.
• Our vision is that in five years from now, customers won’t have to choose between shopping in-store or shopping online. It’ll be one single unified mode that Instacart powers.
• The inspiration to drive into the offline retail space comes from two places: our users and from our retailer partners.
• Instacart is a four-sided marketplace. It serves retailers, users, CPGs, and Instacart shoppers, people who go in and pick the order.
• The whole Connected Stores platform is built on the principle of modularity.
• We’re seeing consumers love being able to clip coupons from the retailer on the cart, view offers, view flowers etc. They’re really using the screen as a way to decide what to put in their basket and what not to put in their basket.
• The piece that I’m most excited about with the cart is the opportunity to really make the experience delightful, make shopping an adventure.
• Customers, when you talk to them, tell us, they love skipping the line, they love that seamlessness. But it’s actually not the number one value problem. If you talk to customers today, they tell you the number one thing they love or keep saying is the running total that they get from the screen on the cart.
• The number two thing is coupons, being able to access the retailer coupons on the screen, make decisions around what to put in the basket, what to take out based on those coupon capabilities.
• On TikTok, when we launch in a new store, there’s people (organic users) posting videos of the cart, and these videos will often go viral. We’ll often see somebody with 8-900 followers, and they’ll post one of these videos and it’ll get hundreds of thousands of views over the course of a couple days.
• In a recent launch, where we only have 10 carts in store right now we seen such a positive response that, no joke, people were waiting in line for five minutes to access these carts.
• In fact, one senior citizen said that he had been to his store to use the carts 10 times in 2 weeks as he loved using it so much.
• David’s best advice: Within the grocery and retail industry, I would say it starts with digitization. It sounds obvious, but for the vast majority of customers, their experience is not digitized. Retailers do not have digital touch points, deep digital touch points with the vast majority of their customers. And yet that’s the reality in the way that the vast majority of customers are shopping with these stores and in-store today. And so the opportunity starts with digitizing those customers. And once you digitize them, you can measure them, you can study them, you can optimize for them, you can monetize them, but it starts with digitization.
• David’s Punk XL brand: YouTube

About David

David McIntosh is VP and GM of Connected Stores at Instacart. His team delivers solutions that enable retailers to offer seamless retail experiences across online and in-store, benefitting retailers and their customers. Previously, in his role as VP of Product, Retailer, he led the development of Instacart Platform. Prior to joining Instacart in 2021, David was the CEO and co-founder of Tenor, a leading expression search engine which Google acquired in 2018. At Google, David grew Tenor to over 1 Billion users and more than 1 Billion queries per day.

Check out Instacart, some of their Connected Stores technology, like Caper Cart, say Hi to them on X (Twitter) @Instacart and feel free to follow/connect with David on LinkedIn here.

Image credit: Thanks to Instacart.