How Instacart Automated High-Value Outreach with Gumloop

With over 3,000 employees, Instacart was looking for a scalable way to empower non-technical staff to leverage AI like engineers do. One of the initial use cases they tackled with was empowering their Sales reps with workflow automation.

Instacart may be known for reinventing how we shop for groceries, but behind the scenes, its SDRs were facing a familiar hurdle: the manual, time-intensive process of customizing outreach for thousands of potential brand partners. Much of their day was spent sifting through Salesforce data, running manual email drafts, and juggling multiple spreadsheets containing brands’ sales and performance data. These repetitive tasks not only reduced productivity but also risked missing out on revenue from top-tier accounts.

That all changed when Instacart started using Gumloop as an end-to-end AI solution for automating outreach—freeing SDRs to focus on what they do best: building relationships and closing deals.

Highlights

✅ Doubled New Customer Meetings
Instacart saw nearly double the meetings per SDR when they leveraged Gumloop.‍

✅ Doubled High Quality Outreach Volume
With Gumloop, SDRs were able to scale outreach without sacrificing personalization.

✅ NPS (Net Promoter Score) of 9.8 Among Pilot Users
SDRs loved how easily they could generate high-quality email drafts in minutes—no technical background needed.

The Challenge

Instacart’s Sales Development Reps (SDRs) were stuck doing repetitive tasks every day. 

Picture juggling three or four different apps just to send one personalized email—pulling in data from CRMs, referencing spreadsheets, crossing fingers the formatting worked in Salesforce Cadences. And once you have the data, SDRs would spend time manually drafting each email - as volume scaled, it was tough to maintain high-quality messaging for top-tier accounts.

It was cumbersome, inconsistent, and frankly, a huge time sink. They knew they were probably missing out on bigger revenue opportunities because nobody had enough hours in the day to handle every lead properly.

The Solution

The idea was simple: let’s see if an AI-powered workflow could tackle most of that busywork, freeing SDRs to do what they do best—talk to customers and close deals.

End-to-End AI Personalization

Instacart built a Gumloop flow that automatically retrieves brand-specific data (contacts, gross merchandise value, purchase history) from Salesforce and connected spreadsheets. As users of Gumloop’s enterprise data platform, all records are encrypted in transit and at rest, with Gumloop having SOC2 Type II certification, direct LLM integrations to Instacart’s own AI platform and zero-data retention, ensuring Instacart business data is kept safe. The AI step then drafts hyper-personalized emails referencing those metrics—reducing manual work to almost zero.

Focused on High-Value Brands

For the pilot, Instacart zeroed in on high-value accounts. By honing in on this segment first, they could measure how much the AI-driven approach sped up outreach and boosted conversions.

Quick Review & Send

A final approval step was put in place so SDRs could make minor edits or add personal touches before sending. This blend of human + AI ensured quality remained high while volume skyrocketed.

All an SDR had to do was glance over it, tweak a detail or two, and click send. Easy.

“When we looked at how much time was spent collecting basic data for each email, we realized we were losing hours of productive work every day. Our reps are here to drive relationships, not to wrestle with spreadsheets.”
— Josh Rider, VP of Commercial Excellence at Instacart

The Outcome

• Almost double the new meetings: Testers booked nearly two times more meetings per rep compared to non-testers.
  
  
• Way more emails, zero extra chaos: Testers ended up sending almost triple the number of emails to those high-priority leads.

It wasn’t just about volume, though. The content was more relevant. By auto-filling key stats (like specific brand performance metrics or unique product categories), the AI saved SDRs from the dreaded copy-paste shuffle. And that freed everyone up to actually think: “How can I position Instacart’s benefits for this brand?” rather than “What was that account’s monthly sales number again?”

When the pilot wrapped, the SDRs who used Gumloop couldn’t stop talking about how much time they saved. NPS came in at a staggering 9.8—every single person basically said, “I’d recommend this to a friend.” For them, it wasn’t just about sending more emails; it was about feeling more confident that they were reaching the right people with the right message.

“It feels like having a personal research assistant. By the time I open Gumloop, everything I need is right there in a draft, ready to go.”
— Gunnar Kozel, Brand Partnerships at Instacart

Conclusion

Seeing the success of the pilot, Instacart plans to roll this out to all SDRs and maybe even more teams. With Gumloop’s direct API access to Salesforce or Snowflake, the team is laser focused on getting to zero manual data entry. And with Instacart and Gumloop centrally managing the encryption and data connections, end-users can build automations with Enterprise grade security, without pulling engineer resources away from mission critical work. The entire process becomes a frictionless “grab data, draft email, move on” machine.

This use case is just the start for Instacart. Teams across the company have been embracing automation - from the operations teams supporting Instacart’s retailers to product teams automating voice of the customer research. Instacart employees are finding opportunities across over a dozen departments to scale the impact of AI automation. 

Rather than relying on lengthy approval processes or pulling engineering resources away from the main product lines, Company-wide, they’re spending less time on manual work and more time delighting retailers, advertisers and consumers.

Ready to Make Outreach Effortless?

If you’re looking to transform your sales or customer engagement workflows, Gumloop can help you build powerful AI automation—no coding required. 

Gumloop will let you create totally custom solutions for your team. No nuance lost. The people who deeply understand right vs wrong in the sales process now have the tools to create solutions for themselves that really work.

Get in touch today to see how we can streamline your outreach and help your teams focus on what really matters: closing deals and delighting customers.