Instacart is Searching for Its Next Act
When people ask me what #Instacart's strategy is right now -- the answer I give them is simple: the company is looking for its next act.
It's clear that the company is trying a basket (see what I did there?) of different things, some with different time horizons, and seeing what sticks.
This is true of its recent acquisition of Caper AI, with its cart and counter technologies, and sets a completely different vision of "just walk out" to Amazon which requires lots of machine vision and store retrofitting.
The big problem with an acquisition-driven approach is that the market can see it as well. It will require quite an integration effort to make the services work well and seamlessly for customers, while at the same time keep the employees that made the services originally valuable in the first place.
The whole "cart and counter will figure it out" strategy sounds fishy and strains credibility. One of the many reasons this thing will never work? You can't put a kid in the cart while shopping. How will this work in actual America?
It won't.
How can Caper say with a straight face it is in deployment around the world if I can't find one Youtube video review which wasn't driven by PR.
Can a bunch of advertising executives run a hardware company? And a supply chain company? (though we haven't seen too much execution on the latter). That is ultimately the question.
