DoorDash Says AI Agents Handle Only a Few Hundred Orders

AI agents may be spreading across the digital world, but they are barely touching DoorDash. On a third-quarter earnings call, co-founder and CEO Tony Xu said AI agents have generated "several hundred orders" on the platform since they became available, calling it a "very low use case" for a service that handled just under 1 billion orders in the third quarter of 2026 alone.

Xu still sees promise for AI agents in bigger decisions, where they could work on a customer's behalf in the background on "long consideration purchases." For something as simple as ordering food, though, he said customers tend to go straight to DoorDash.

There is a caveat for AI boosters: DoorDash only launched its Model Context Protocol connector less than a month ago. The open-standard link lets third-party AI tools order through the platform, but it is limited to a small group of early beta partners and is mainly used to streamline corporate lunch orders. Without it, agents must work harder to reach DoorDash through a web interface.