DoorDash has taken only a few hundred orders from AI agents

For all the talk about agents that shop and buy on your behalf, the real numbers are still tiny. On its third-quarter earnings call, DoorDash said third-party AI agents such as Muse, Instinct, and Fo have placed only "several hundred orders in total" so far. Set that against the roughly three million deliveries the company handled per day in its 2025 report and the gap is stark. Nearly everyone still orders through the DoorDash app, as TechCrunch reports.

CEO Tony Xu was careful not to dismiss the trend. "You never want to fight gravity," he said, while adding that the company also has to avoid being unrealistic about how fast this arrives. DoorDash has been building for it anyway: an Ask DoorDash chatbot in June, a command-line agent in July, a text-to-order agent in September, and an MCP connector that lets other chatbots place orders, aimed first at corporate buying. The wider market is unsettled because websites are still deciding whether to let agents in at all. Amazon blocks personal shopping agents, while Walmart is actively welcoming them in the hope of taking business from rivals.

Why it matters

If you are building or betting on agentic commerce, this is a useful reality check: the plumbing is shipping fast, but real consumer demand is close to zero today. The decision that matters now is whether to court agent developers early, the way Walmart is, or wall them off like Amazon, because that choice shapes who captures the volume when it does arrive.