Third-party AI agents have placed only several hundred DoorDash orders

DoorDash chief executive Tony Xu said on the company's third-quarter earnings call that it has seen "maybe several hundred orders in total" from third-party AI agents. TechCrunch published the remark on October 30, 2026. Xu gave the figure in answer to an analyst's question about agent-placed orders. For scale, the company's third-quarter release reported 993 million total orders, up 28% year over year. TechCrunch notes that DoorDash's 2025 report put its average at 3 million deliveries a day.

Xu's answer was hedged. "I would say that this [using agents to order] is something that is still a very dynamic area," he said, adding that "you never want to fight gravity. But at the same time, you don't want to be delusional." He said users still predominantly order through DoorDash's own app. TechCrunch reported that DoorDash wants to learn more about agentic use cases and build a working relationship with third-party agent makers. Xu said there could be a future opportunity to advertise inside those agents.

The figure covers only orders from outside agents. DoorDash has built several of its own, according to TechCrunch: Ask DoorDash, a chatbot launched in June that lets users place orders through prompts and photos; a command-line interface agent introduced in July; and a text-to-order agent launched in September. The company also released a Model Context Protocol connector, which lets compatible AI tools place orders, aimed at corporate ordering. In its September 30 announcement, DoorDash said the connector can find items, build a cart, place an order and track delivery. Employees sign in to their own DoorDash accounts before an agent can act for them. The company named SpaceXAI, Vercel, Cognition, Tempo and Mercor as early beta partners and opened a waitlist beginning September 30.

The third-quarter release frames this work around its physical network. It says that "as AI personal agents are now starting to become more mainstream, our strategy today remains focused on winning the battle for atoms," while the company still contributes to AI digitally.

TechCrunch named three third-party agents, Muse, Instinct and Fo, among those sending orders. The article doesn't say how the several hundred orders divide among them, or over what period Xu was counting. Access to agents is also unsettled across the industry, TechCrunch wrote, because websites are still deciding whether to allow them to reach their content. Amazon has been blocking such personal agents, while Walmart has rolled out a welcome mat for them to snag business from its competitors.