DoorDash CEO: AI Agent Orders Total ‘Several Hundred’ So Far

Tony Xu, chief executive of U.S. delivery platform DoorDash, said on the company’s third-quarter earnings call that orders coming in through outside AI agents number “several hundred in total.” That is a negligible amount for a company that, according to its 2025 report, delivers an average of about 3 million orders a day.

U.S. tech outlet TechCrunch reported on October 30 (UTC) that Xu said, “I think there are maybe several hundred orders in total that come from these third-party agents.” External agents named as having placed orders included Muse, Instinct and Fo. Most user orders are still placed in DoorDash’s own app.

DoorDash said, in effect, that it should not fight the technology trend but also should not overestimate where AI agents currently stand. The company aims to learn about agent use cases and build relationships with third-party agent developers, and over the long term it sees potential opportunities to advertise within agents.

DoorDash has also rolled out a series of its own AI products. In June 2026 it launched Ask DoorDash, a chatbot that takes orders from prompts and photos; in July a command-line Instrument(CLI) agent; and in September an agent that takes orders by text message. Its MCP (Model Context Protocol, an open standard for connecting AI to outside services) connector, which lets other chatbots place orders, targets corporate group orders.

Industry responses are divided. According to TechCrunch, websites are still deciding whether to allow AI agents access; Amazon is blocking personal shopping agents, while Walmart is welcoming them to draw in competitors’ customers.

Expectations are high for an era in which agents shop for groceries and order food on our behalf, but the figure of only several hundred external agent orders on a platform delivering 3 million orders a day shows the current scale of such transactions. It is significant that the platform disclosed this itself.

Source: TechCrunch

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This article was translated from the Korean edition of Science Monitor with AI assistance and reviewed by our editors.