The news: Instacart unveiled a host of AI-powered advertising tools that will make it easier for brands to set up campaigns in a bid to rev up slowing ad growth.

The new features: The centerpiece of the product suite is Instacart’s Universal Campaigns feature, which allows advertisers to create a campaign that automatically optimizes performance across multiple ad formats in real time, on a single budget. All brands have to do is pick their objective, and Instacart’s technology will handle budget allocation and format selection to maximize results.

Other tools include:

• AI-powered landing pages, which companies can use to create shoppable, branded destinations that showcase their products alongside custom copy
• Recommendations in Ads Manager for actionable, data-driven insights that advertisers can implement in a single click to improve campaign performance

Why it matters: While overall retail media spending is growing at a healthy pace—20.2% this year, per our forecast—Instacart’s share of retail media dollars is slipping as larger players like Walmart and Amazon scoop up a greater share of budgets and CPG advertisers experiment with new networks.

Brands also have higher expectations for the retail media networks (RMNs) they work with, putting the onus on Instacart to simplify the ad buying experience, expand its reach to fast-growing channels like CTV and in-store retail media, and otherwise help advertisers optimize spend.

Our take: We expect Instacart’s ad revenue growth to fall below 10% for the first time this year amid fierce competition for retail media dollars.

• Its new AI-powered advertising capabilities could boost its appeal to brands both large and small by making it quicker and easier to set up campaigns.
• But Instacart’s attractiveness as an advertising platform also depends on the health of its core grocery delivery business—which could face headwinds as grocers like Kroger invest in their own ecommerce capabilities and consumers look for ways to save on rising grocery bills.