DoorDash Says AI Agents Have Placed Only 'Several Hundred' Orders

The chatter about AI agents reshaping shopping may be running ahead of reality. On its third-quarter earnings call, DoorDash said third-party agents such as Muse, Instinct and Fo have placed just "several hundred" orders in total - a speck next to the roughly 3 million deliveries the company said it handles daily.

CEO Tony Xu called agent-based ordering "a very dynamic area," adding: "You never want to fight gravity. But at the same time, you don't want to be delusional." Most customers, he said, still order through DoorDash's own app.

Even so, DoorDash is hedging. It has rolled out its own agent tools - a text-to-order feature from September, a CLI agent from July and the Ask DoorDash chatbot from June - plus an MCP for corporate ordering through other chatbots. Xu suggested advertising inside third-party agents could be an opportunity down the road.

The wider industry is split on the trend: Amazon has been blocking personal agents, while Walmart has welcomed them.