This is the first in a 5-part series, You Can’t Prompt Produce, on the AI grocers keep shipping, and most shoppers keep skipping.
TL;DR
AI adoption is real, but it's concentrated in one demographic slice: young, urban, college-educated, and online. Grocery's actual customer base looks nothing like that; most shoppers still walk into a store, skew older, and rarely touch a chatbot.
Walmart, Amazon, and Instacart's AI bets make sense for them; they're chasing a genuinely growing, high-income online segment. Most grocers don't have that segment, that scale, or that capital, and copying the playbook anyway is solving the wrong problem. The better bet is boring: demand forecasting, shrink reduction, the stuff that doesn't need a customer to open a chat window.
Scroll through any conference keynote or ‘thought leader’s’ post this year, and you’ll hear the same assumption stated as settled fact: everyone uses AI now, daily, instinctively. Many point to Pew’s latest number: 49% of US adults now use AI chatbots.1
That number is not nothing. It’s just smaller and stranger than the hype implies. Grocers have the most at stake here, because their actual customer base looks like the excluded half of the country, not those on the tech conference stage.
What “using AI” actually means
Let’s get back to that number. Pew found 49% of US adults now use AI chatbots, up from 33% in 2024 and 23% in 2023. ChatGPT alone reached 44 percent of adults, up from 18 percent in 2023 and 34 percent in 2025.
But what do they mean by “use”?
Dig deeper, and you’ll find that only 24% use chatbots daily. Half the country has never opened one. Another chunk opened one once, maybe out of curiosity, and never went back. Trying something and living inside it are different behaviors, and the topline adoption number conflates them into one figure.
Layer on age and that gap stops being a footnote and starts being the whole story. 66% of those 18 to 29 ‘use’ it, and that number drops to 42% for 50- to 64-year-olds, and 23% for those 65 and older. Reverse those numbers, and you get the plain sentence nobody puts in a keynote: most Americans over 50 have never used a chatbot.
Education plays a role. A Brookings analysis released alongside Pew’s numbers found a steep education gradient, with generative AI use hitting 67% among adults with a bachelor’s degree or higher vs. 24% for those without.2
And geography adds a third axis. Microsoft’s county-level diffusion data for early 2026 found metropolitan counties carry an average AI user share of 32.9%, more than twice the 16.2% average in rural counties.3 Rural America is using AI at roughly half the metro rate.
(None of that is the same conversation as passive AI, such as the recommendation feeds and spam filters running quietly in the background. That layer is functionally universal. This isn't the same as opening a chat window and typing a prompt.)
Why the industry can’t see it
Full disclosure: I live in San Francisco, a city that tech journalist Kara Swisher once called “assisted living for millennials.” It’s hard to escape AI in these parts, and that can easily warp perceptions of what happens outside of the Bay Area bubble.
The people making the loudest claims about universal adoption are the same demographic where it's already near-universal: under 40, college-educated, urban, knowledge workers. A chatbot slots into their job at a keyboard; it has no obvious slot in stocking shelves or driving a route. Ask SF Bay Area techies if "everyone" uses AI, and they’ll answer based on everyone they know.
That's not bias. It's sampling error. Silicon Valley is measuring a room and reporting it as the country.
The wrong playbook
Most grocers are trying to mimic the wrong retailers: Walmart, Amazon, and Instacart.
Walmart’s own online numbers make the point more precisely. Lower-income households are still Walmart’s largest online grocery segment by volume. But its fastest-growing slice, the one driving recent gains, is households earning $200,000 or more, growing almost five times faster than the overall base.
That’s exactly where Walmart pointed its AI efforts. In March, it embedded Sparky, its shopping assistant, directly into ChatGPT and Gemini, chasing what CEO Doug McMillon called a “native AI experience.” Amazon and Instacart built the same pattern into their own tools.
That’s three layers of mismatch, not one. Online grocery is still only about 19% of total US spend.4 Inside that minority channel, the affluent shoppers Amazon, Instacart, and Walmart are chasing are a minority too.
All three retailers have the talent, scale, and capital to make those bets. Most grocers don't, but they keep copying that playbook anyway. They build in-house chatbots that go unused, aimed at a shopper base that doesn't look like the one Walmart, Amazon, and Instacart are chasing, in age, income, education, or geography.
Copying Walmart’s answer to a different question doesn’t fix it.
The mismatch
The AI mass adoption story is real. It’s just landing almost entirely on one narrow slice of the population, the slice that also happens to write the roadmaps and fund the pilots. Call it a mismatch.
And Silicon Valley is still clueless about who’s actually in the grocery aisle.
Is your non-tech inner circle, or your actual store’s shopper base, prompting AI tools on a weekly basis? Or are we all just describing the same twelve people in San Francisco to each other?
You Can’t Prompt Produce is a five-part series on how the AI grocers keep shipping, and most shoppers keep skipping.
“Americans and AI 2026: Chatbots, Smart Devices and Views on Impact.” Pew Research: https://www.pewresearch.org/internet/2026/06/17/americans-and-ai-2026-chatbots-smart-devices-and-views-on-impact
“How are Americans using AI?” Brookings Institute: https://www.brookings.edu/articles/how-are-americans-using-ai-evidence-from-a-nationwide-survey
“AI Diffusion in the United States.” Microsoft (PDF): https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/research/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/Microsoft-US-AI-Diffusion-Report-2026-Q1.pdf
“eGrocery’s Hyper-Growth Stage: How Traditional Grocers Can Fight Back.” Brick Meets Click: https://www.brickmeetsclick.com/insights/egrocerys-hyper-growth-stage-how-traditional-grocers-can-fight-back