DoorDash CEO says AI agents place only several hundred orders a quarter

Several hundred orders. That is every third-party AI agent order DoorDash has ever received. DoorDash CEO Tony Xu told analysts the number on the company's third-quarter call this week.

TechCrunch reports Xu's answer to an analyst question about agents. "If you look at where AI agents are today, we're seeing maybe several hundred orders in total," he said. Xu added that the orders came from outside agents. He told the call that users still almost always order inside the DoorDash app.

What Xu said about agent commerce

Xu framed the figure as a signal, not a verdict. "This is something that is still a very dynamic area," he told the call, as quoted by TechCrunch. "You never want to fight gravity. But at the same time, you don't want to be delusional."

TechCrunch reports Xu said DoorDash wants to work with outside agent makers. He said advertising inside those agents may become a product later. DoorDash has already built its own agents. There is a text-to-order agent from September. There is a CLI agent from July. There is Ask DoorDash, a chatbot from June that takes orders through prompts and photos. DoorDash also released an MCP server for corporate ordering.

The number sits against the whole DoorDash marketplace

TechCrunch frames "several hundred" against DoorDash's own scale. Xu's answer draws the line in plain words: users still "predominantly" place orders through the DoorDash app. Agents are a rounding error.

The TechCrunch article does not name the outside agents behind those several hundred orders. The figure Xu gave covers only third parties. It does not include DoorDash's own agents.

Merchants are still deciding whether to let agents in

TechCrunch notes a split in how large retailers treat shopping agents. Amazon has blocked such personal agents from its site. Walmart has opened its catalog to them. Walmart's push is to take business from its competitors.

That split is the real story under the DoorDash figure. An agent builder can produce a shopper that writes an order in a second. The merchant still decides whether that order gets through. The merchant decides how the money settles. The merchant decides who answers the refund call. On the shopper side, the technology is ready. On the merchant side, few are.

A team building an agent that places orders can read the DoorDash number as a floor. Producing an agent is cheap. Getting a merchant to accept the orders is where the quarters go. DoorDash already runs its own agents in production. It only sees several hundred third-party orders. Every other merchant is seeing fewer.

Source

DoorDash said it's only received 'several hundred' orders from AI agents, TechCrunch, by Ivan Mehta.