While there has been a big uproar about AI agents taking over commerce and orders, DoorDash in its third-quarter earnings call revealed that it had only seen “several hundred” orders from third-party agents like Muse, Instinct, Fo, and others. For comparison, the company said in its 2025 report it completed an average of three million deliveries daily. “I would say that this [using agents to order] is something that is still a very dynamic area.
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,” DoorDash chief executive officer, Tony Xu said in an answer to an analyst’s questions about the topic. “What I mean by that is if you look at where AI agents are today, we’re seeing maybe several hundred orders in total from some of these thirdparty agents,” he said. Xu mentioned that users are still predominantly placing orders through DoorDash’s app.
However, the company wants to learn more about agentic use cases and develop a healthy relationship with third-party agent makers. He added that, in the future, there could be an opportunity for it to advertise within these agents. DoorDash has its own agents, including a text-to-order agent it launched in September, a CLI agent introduced in July, and a chatbot called Ask DoorDash it launched it June, which allows users to place orders through prompts and photos.
The company also released an MCP to enable ordering from other chatbots for corporate ordering. The space of agent-based ordering is evolving, as websites are still deciding whether to allow them to access their content or not. Amazon has been blocking such personal agents, but Walmart has laid out a red carpet for them in order to snag some business from its competitors.
