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David McIntosh is Chief Connected Stores Officer at Instacart, where he leads the team behind the company's smart shopping carts. He previously was the co-founder and CEO of Tenor, the GIF search engine used across billions of messages, before moving into grocery technology.

With Liam, he goes on to talk about Instacart's $350 million acquisition of Caper and why the company chose smart carts over ceiling cameras as its bet on in-store AI. They get into the engineering problems that come with building a cart that can "see", like sensor fusion, and why something as simple as detecting an empty basket turns out to be surprisingly hard, along with who owns the shopping data these systems generate, and how agentic AI is starting to show up in tools like Cart Assistant.

Also available on Spotify & Apple Podcasts.

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