There's a lot of buzz about AI agents revolutionizing commerce and taking over ordering, but the reality might be more modest than the hype suggests. DoorDash disclosed during its third-quarter earnings call that it has received only "several hundred" orders from third-party agents such as Muse, Instinct, Fo, and others. To put that in perspective, the company stated in its 2025 report that it handles an average of 3 million deliveries every day.

"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 CEO Tony Xu remarked when responding to an analyst's question on the subject. "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 third-party agents," he explained.

Xu noted that the vast majority of users continue to place orders through DoorDash's own app. Still, the company is eager to understand agentic use cases better and build a constructive relationship with third-party agent developers. He also suggested that advertising within these agents could become an opportunity down the road.

DoorDash has been developing its own agent offerings, including a text-to-order agent launched in September, a CLI agent introduced in July, and a chatbot called Ask DoorDash that debuted in June, which lets users place orders via prompts and photos. The company also released an MCP to enable ordering through other chatbots for corporate ordering purposes.

The agent-based ordering landscape is still taking shape, with websites divided on whether to grant these agents access to their content. Amazon has been blocking such personal agents, while Walmart has welcomed them with open arms in an effort to capture business from its competitors.