Mehta: useful AI agents must offer more than saving a few taps

Discussing AI agents, Apoorva Mehta said Instacart already saves customers hours each week by sparing them the trip to a store, the search for parking and checkout lines. The hosts suggested that reducing a few screen taps may be a smaller improvement than the original time savings from grocery delivery.

Mehta did not dismiss agents’ value: he said they will be useful and that he is particularly interested in agents that can understand a family’s dietary needs and preferences, then proactively help people eat more healthily. He stressed, however, that this use case has not yet been fully realized and that the field is at an early stage. He called Instacart an “original agentic company” in the sense that a human shopper already carries out a task on a customer’s behalf.

In Mehta’s view, companies that have solved the difficult operational problem beneath their services can improve their own interfaces with natural language and other features. A host separately opined that improving individual apps may be more promising than a general-purpose agent told to do the shopping.