DoorDash CEO: Outside AI agents have placed only a few hundred orders
Basically no one is using AI agents for their DoorDash orders
DoorDash handled just under 1 billion orders in Q3 2026, yet third-party AI agents have generated only several hundred of them, CEO Tony Xu said on the earnings call. He called it a "very low use case," arguing people still order food directly because the task is simple. A new Model Context Protocol connector, live for under a month with early beta partners, may change that, and DoorDash's own Ask DoorDash tool already builds baskets five times faster.
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.
- theturtletalks
Just because text isn't the best interface for agentic commerce doesn't mean agentic commerce is dead.
The way I'm building my open-source marketplace[0], each store's storefront and cart are rendered right in the chat through MCP UI. So you can ask the agent to change something in your cart or add something, but you also have a real cart in the UI that you can tap and edit directly.
- paxy
People coming up with these tech use cases live in a reality where price sensitivity isn't a thing.
"You can call an Uber with a voice command"
"You can ask alexa to buy you things"
"Your AI will order food for you"
Seem like magical ideas that will remove friction and increase sales. Except that regular people compare 13 different options to pick the cheapest one. No one wants to see food appear on their doorstep followed by a bill they cannot pay.
- Grombobulous
Something that is perhaps “underreported” is that a lot of AI solutions aren’t easier to do than just doing the thing.
My budget app, for example: It’s not easier for me to ask the AI bot “show me all my transactions from McDonald’s” than it is to click on the search bar/payee filter and type “McDonald’s.”
But if I use the AI bot, I’m burning tokens.
- joegibbs
“Get me a burrito. Ok cool are there any other places? Ok but how about ones under 50 minutes delivery? Ok now of those which has higher than 4.5 stars? Alright that one looks good, can I get a large lamb burrito with extra salsa and guac? Ok they don’t do lamb that’s fine, beef is good. They don’t do a large size, that’s alright go with a small. Yes confirm payment.”
Text is just not a good format for ordering things. You want to see pictures and just click on the options you want - we’ve had people paid 300k working on the optimal visual interface for this for probably 30 years, just trying to improve the sale rate 2%.
Agents are good for open ended problems which require stringing together lots of different data sources, which couldn’t be further from ordering food.
- simonw
Ordering off DoorDash seems to me like the worst possible case for agents (or Alexa voice speakers before them.)
I need to see the full menu, with prices and picture of the food and options. Having an agent in the middle is just going to slow me down.
- rolosa
I would not trust the AI to order food off of these websites for me because the labeled data itself is pretty much shit. Lots of dishes are unlabeled, have really bad pictures or no pictures at all, and the worse is the ones that have AI generated descriptions which are often wrong or not helpful. I'm totally fine with letting it just use my saved credit cards and delivery address (I assume the AI doesn't see them) but I can't trust it to order the food I actually want.
E: As an example (n = 1 etc): I am vegetarian. I have never ordered meat dishes, ever. Yet all of these food delivery apps suggest meat dishes for me.
- cush
Recently I needed to book a table for 16 for a rehearsal dinner. I used ChatGPT work to find availabilities and create an html doc of only restaurants that could handle our party size, with pictures, menu comparisons, locations, and approximate prices. It knocked the task out of the park and I went with one of the recommended restaurants.
That said, the last mile, the bit where I paid, I called the kitchen manager and talked to them. Even if I trusted ChatGPT with this part, I like building a rapport with who’s serving me and my family food, and it’s a special occasion so I know they want to nail the experience. ChatGPT saved me so many hours of work and research and replaced Google, yelp, and so many other random services.
I don’t think agents are going to work with DoorDash they’re going to replace DoorDash - taking their core competency of helping me discover and choose what’s new and interesting to me, what restaurant is open and meets my criteria and let me stay connected with the people rather than building a wall between me and them
- sharkjacobs
Remember when Amazon thought that people would say "buy me more paper towels" to their Echo? And of course they didn't because that's insane.