DoorDash: only 'several hundred' orders have come from AI agents

DoorDash — On its Q3 earnings call, DoorDash disclosed that third-party AI agents — the shopping assistants like Muse, Instinct and Fo that place orders on a user's behalf — have generated only 'several hundred' orders in total. Against roughly 3 million deliveries a day, that is a rounding error: people are still ordering through the app, not through agents.

If you are weighing an agent-ordering or agent-purchasing feature on your own roadmap, this is the cleanest data point yet that announced demand is far ahead of actual demand. Tony Xu's stance is also a template: don't fight the trend, don't be delusional about it — DoorDash built its own text-to-order agent in September and an ordering MCP, while keeping the door open to advertising inside third-party agents. The split among platforms is telling: Amazon blocks personal shopping agents outright, while Walmart has rolled out the welcome mat hoping to poach business. TechCrunch

“if you look at where AI agents are today, we’re seeing maybe several hundred orders in total from some of these third-party agents”

Ship the plumbing, defer the bet. A first-party agent feature (a text-to-order flow, an MCP endpoint) is cheap insurance against a platform shift; betting the roadmap on agent-driven transactions is not yet supported by usage anywhere.

DoorDash's several-hundred-orders number says the user behavior hasn't arrived. This quarter, build the interface and instrument how many users actually come through it, and let that number — not the hype — decide the next investment. DoorDash shipped its ordering MCP for corporate orders before demand showed up, which is the pattern to copy. TechCrunch