DoorDash: AI agents have placed only “several hundred” orders so far
DoorDash said on its third-quarter earnings call that third-party AI agents have placed only “several hundred” orders on its platform. TechCrunch reported the remark on 30 October 2026. The agents named include Muse, Instinct and Fo. The company’s 2025 report put its average at 3 million deliveries a day, so agent orders are a tiny fraction of its volume.
What the CEO said
An analyst asked about agent-driven ordering. CEO Tony Xu called it a very dynamic area. He said that in technology you should never fight gravity, but you also should not be delusional. By his count, the company sees perhaps several hundred orders in total from some third-party agents.
Xu added that most users still place orders through DoorDash’s own app. He said the company is interested in understanding how agents get used for ordering, and in building a healthy relationship with the makers of third-party agents. He also raised the possibility that DoorDash could eventually advertise inside these agents. The source gives no timeline or details for that idea.
DoorDash’s own agent tools
DoorDash is also building its own agent products:
- Ask DoorDash, a chatbot launched in June, lets users order through prompts and photos.
- A CLI agent was introduced in July.
- A text-to-order agent launched in September.
- The company has also released an MCP so that corporate ordering can happen from other chatbots.
An unsettled access landscape
TechCrunch notes that websites have not settled whether to let agents reach their content. Amazon has been blocking such personal agents. Walmart has rolled out a welcome for them, aiming to win business from competitors.
Why it matters for agents
This is one company’s account, and the source does not say how the figure was counted or how it has changed over time. Even so, it is a concrete data point against the idea that agents are already taking over commerce. Several hundred orders against millions of daily deliveries suggests third-party agents are at a very early stage on this platform.
For agent developers, two signals stand out. First, a large merchant is open to a relationship with third-party agents but is putting its main effort into its own interfaces. Second, the mention of advertising inside agents hints at how platforms might later try to make money from agent traffic. Nothing in the source indicates that a program exists.
The contrast between Amazon’s blocking and Walmart’s welcome shows that access terms differ by retailer. Agents that order for users may therefore face different rules and incentives from one merchant to the next. It is unclear from the source whether DoorDash plans any formal access policy for outside agents.
Sources
This article was prepared with AI assistance and reviewed by an Emerge Times editor before publication.