Meta’s Muse AI agent, which launched September 8 as a standalone app and WhatsApp tool, can now pick groceries and complete checkout without a user ever opening a retailer’s website, and a September 23 analysis from 24/7 Wall St. says that shift is rattling Instacart’s investors.
Instacart’s stock dropped 11% over the past month even after the company beat revenue estimates, and the worry centers on advertising, the highest-margin slice of a business that roughly 600,000 independent shoppers help keep running.
What Muse Actually Threatens
Instacart’s ad business crossed $1 billion in 2025 and grew 16%, but that revenue depends on a shopper actually seeing a sponsored product on screen while browsing. When an AI agent selects items and checks out on its own, that visual real estate loses much of its value to advertisers.
Amazon has already blocked Muse from completing purchases on its platform, a sign that at least one major retailer views agent-led shopping as a real threat rather than a novelty. Instacart’s second-quarter numbers still looked healthy on paper: $746 million in transaction revenue, $297 million in advertising revenue, and gross transaction value up 14% year over year.
Why This Matters For Instacart’s Independent Shoppers
Instacart’s roughly 600,000 shoppers depend on the company having enough order volume and enough cash to invest in growth, incentives, and batch availability. A sustained hit to its most profitable revenue line could eventually squeeze the budget available for all three, even though nobody has automated the physical work of picking items off a shelf yet.
Gig workers on other platforms have already watched incentives shrink once a company’s margins came under pressure, so this is a trend worth tracking rather than dismissing as an investor-only story. Physical fulfillment work is harder to replace than a website ad slot, but it is not immune to the budget decisions that follow when a platform’s core business model gets squeezed.
What Self-Employed Shoppers And Drivers Should Do Next
Avoid relying on a single gig platform for all of your income if you can help it, since this kind of business-model pressure tends to show up first in pay and incentive changes rather than public announcements. Track your own batch pay and tip totals over the next few months for any pattern shift.
Pay attention to whether the grocery chains you shop for start offering their own AI checkout tools directly, since that could route orders around delivery apps entirely rather than just changing how Instacart makes money.
What To Watch Next
Watch Instacart’s next earnings call for how it plans to respond, including whether it builds new ad formats designed for AI agents instead of human eyes, or leans harder on its shopper network as a differentiator that agents like Muse cannot easily replicate.
Also watch whether other major retailers follow Amazon’s lead and block agent-led checkouts, since a wave of similar blocks would suggest incumbents see this as an industry-wide fight rather than an Instacart-specific problem.
