Despite all the hype about AI agents taking over commerce and orders, that may not be the case yet. Delivery company DoorDash said on its third-quarter earnings call that it only received “a few hundred” orders from third-party distributors such as Muse, Instinct and Fo. For comparison, the company said in its 2025 report that it completed an average of 3 million deliveries each day.
“I would say this (ordering with agents) is still a very dynamic space, and my view on technology in general is that we never want to fight gravity, but at the same time we don’t want to be paranoid either,” DoorDash CEO Tony Hsu said in response to an analyst question on the subject. “So if you look at the current landscape of AI agents, we’re probably seeing hundreds of orders in total from some of these third-party agents,” he said.
Xu said users are still ordering primarily through the DoorDash app. However, the company is looking to learn more about agent use cases and develop healthy relationships with third-party agent manufacturers. He added that there may be opportunities to advertise within these agencies in the future.
DoorDash now has its own agents, including a text ordering agent launched in September, a CLI agent introduced in July, and a chatbot called Ask DoorDash launched in June that allows users to order through prompts and photos. The company also released MCP, which enables orders from other chatbots for corporate orders.
The realm of agent-based ordering is evolving as websites are still deciding whether to allow access to their content. Amazon has been blocking these independent agents, but Walmart rolled out the red carpet for them in an effort to steal business from competitors.
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