What If the “Messy” Phase Is the Best Time to Start?
Every Malaysian SME owner knows the feeling. You open your inventory file and see six different spellings for “iPhone Case”. Your WhatsApp orders are a chaotic mix of voice notes, Emojis, and half-written addresses. Your accounts team spends hours reconciling files. The natural instinct is to stop everything, clean the data, and upgrade your system. But Instacart, one of the world’s largest on-demand delivery platforms, just proved that this instinct might be the very thing holding you back. What if you didn’t need to fix the mess to start seeing real results?
What Happened at Instacart?
At the VB Transform 2026 conference, Instacart’s CTO Anirban Kundu introduced a concept that sounds like heresy to traditional operation managers: they have stopped worrying about “tech debt.” For a tech company, “tech debt” is the accumulation of messy, outdated code that slows everything down. For years, the only solution was to pause and rewrite it. Kundu revealed that AI agents now handle the bulk of their code generation. In fact, in 97% of cases, Instacart’s builders don’t even read the code the AI writes. The AI creates it, runs the tests, and if a piece of work isn’t actively used, the AI simply drops it and rebuilds it [Source].
“The benefit of that is we don’t care about tech debt anymore,” Kundu said [Source]. The remaining 3% of work requiring human hands involves legacy compliance and latency-sensitive systems that need human judgment. An evaluation system runs over 7,000 automatic tests each month, maintaining a 99.9% accuracy rate.
Instacart also developed an internal AI agent called “Blueberry” that acts as a site reliability engineer. It watches over 200 Slack channels simultaneously. In one critical incident, a database shard started failing. While the human team scrambled to diagnose an issue they had never seen before, Blueberry posted a precise diagnosis in Slack after just 20 minutes—tying the failure to a feature rollout configuration. This boosted their accuracy in detecting production issues from roughly 60% to over 90% [Source].
“In the past, the tactical level was the creation of the code. In the most tactical level going forward, it’s going to be, ‘How do you navigate around the AI system to give you what you want?’” — Anirban Kundu, CTO, Instacart [Source]
Why This Matters for Malaysian SMEs
You might be thinking, “I don’t write code. This doesn’t apply to me.” But the core lesson is universal: you don’t have to fix the foundation to build the house.
For the average Malaysian SME with 1 to 50 employees, “tech debt” looks different. It isn’t a bad line of code. It is a customer database riddled with duplicates. It is an operational workflow that depends entirely on one person’s memory of how to process a specific order type. It is the Excel sheet that breaks every time someone accidentally spills coffee on the keyboard. Conventional wisdom tells you to “fix the process first.” But that takes months, requires technical expertise you might not have, and distracts you from actually serving customers and selling.
Instacart’s story offers a better path. Just as their AI agents can build over messy code, new generative AI tools can work with your existing messy data. You can feed an AI agent your chaotic order history, and it will learn to categorize your products and cut invoice processing time by 80%. You can point an AI system at your manual operations, and it can generate standard operating procedures or even handle customer queries based on your specific pricing sheets. The phrase “we don’t care about tech debt anymore” means you don’t need a perfect, integrated ERP system to start automating your daily bottlenecks.
The Bigger Picture: Human Intuition vs AI Observation
Perhaps the most interesting insight from Instacart’s journey concerns the “Blueberry” agent. Kundu noted that the human team was hindered by their own intuition. “Would have a human been as quick? I think the problem is human intuition would hold us back a little bit,” he said [Source].
Humans tend to look for patterns they have seen before. A Malaysian SME owner might assume a sudden drop in fulfillment is due to a slow courier, because that’s what happened last month. An AI agent looks at all the variables—the payment gateway response time, the supplier’s stock report, the specific shift of the packer—and finds the actual bottleneck that a busy human brain filtered out. This is the true competitive advantage hiding in the Instacart story. As an SME owner, you are likely fighting fires every single day. You have blind spots. Instacart showed that an AI agent, watching your entire operation, can spot the subtle “hiccups” that your intuition misses simply because you are exhausted from the chaos.
This signals a massive shift in strategy for Malaysian business owners. You no longer have to choose between “cleaning up your mess” and “growing your business.” You can do both simultaneously.
How to Apply Instacart’s Mindset to Your SME
| Instacart’s Principle | Your SME Action Item |
|---|---|
| Stop worrying about Tech Debt | Stop waiting for perfect data. Automate your current workflows as they are. |
| AI generates and replaces code | Use AI assistants to draft customer emails, generate reports, or create SOPs instantly. |
| AI monitors 200+ channels | Connect your business WhatsApp, Email, and CRM to an AI observer to flag issues early. |
| Engineers focus on “Intent” | As a business owner, just describe the outcome. Let the tools figure out the repetitive steps. |
The world is shifting from a “Build to Last” mindset to a “Build to Adapt” mindset. You no longer have to be a big corporation with a pristine IT department to leverage high-level automation. You just need the courage to point a smart tool at your messy business and say, “Make this work.”
Instacart doesn’t care about tech debt anymore. You shouldn’t have to wait for a clean slate either.
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