The rush to let AI agents handle online shopping may be running ahead of the actual orders. DoorDash said on its third-quarter earnings call that it has seen only “several hundred” orders from third-party AI agents, including Muse, Instinct and Fo. For scale, the company said in its 2025 report that it completes an average of 3 million deliveries a day.
CEO Tony Xu addressed the topic after an analyst asked about it. “I would say that this [using agents to order] is something that is still a very dynamic area,” he said. “And my take on all things technology is you never want to fight gravity. But at the same time, you don’t want to be delusional.”
How many orders have third-party AI agents placed with DoorDash?
Xu put the numbers in plain terms. “If you look at where AI agents are today, we’re seeing maybe several hundred orders in total from some of these third-party agents,” he said. Most customers still place their orders through DoorDash’s app, he added.
DoorDash wants to learn more about agentic use cases and develop a working relationship with the companies building third-party agents. Xu said that in the future, the company could have an opportunity to advertise within those agents.
Is DoorDash building its own AI ordering agents?
The company is not waiting for outside agents to catch on. It has built several of its own tools. Ask DoorDash, a chatbot launched in June, lets users place orders through prompts and photos. A command-line interface agent followed in July, and a text-to-order agent launched in September. DoorDash also released a Model Context Protocol, or MCP, that enables ordering from other chatbots for corporate ordering.
The rules for agent access are still unsettled. Websites are still deciding whether to let these agents reach their content at all. Amazon has been blocking personal agents. Walmart, by contrast, has rolled out a red carpet for them, hoping to win business away from competitors.
Este artículo fue escrito con la asistencia de IA.
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