DoorDash says AI agents have placed only 'several hundred' orders

A rare hard number on agentic ordering

Amid loud predictions that AI agents are about to take over online shopping, DoorDash has offered a concrete data point that suggests adoption is still marginal. According to TechCrunch, the delivery company said on its third-quarter earnings call that it has received only "several hundred" orders in total from third-party agents such as Muse, Instinct and Fo. For context, the company has previously said it completes an average of 3 million deliveries per day, a figure cited in its 2025 report.

The disclosure is notable precisely because it is a measured number. Most of the conversation around agentic commerce so far has rested on demos, partnerships and vendor projections rather than on actual transaction volumes reported by a major consumer platform.

What CEO Tony Xu said

DoorDash CEO Tony Xu described agent-based ordering as a space that is still "very dynamic," and framed his philosophy on the technology this way: "you never want to fight gravity" but at the same time "you don't want to be delusional." The several-hundred figure was his answer to an analyst's question on the topic.

Xu acknowledged that customers still overwhelmingly place orders through DoorDash's own app. Even so, he said the company wants to better understand agentic use cases and build a healthy working relationship with the developers of third-party agents. He also pointed to a possible future revenue angle: advertising inside those agents.

DoorDash has been building its own agents anyway

The low third-party volume has not stopped DoorDash from shipping agentic features of its own. Per TechCrunch, the company launched a text-to-order agent in September, introduced a command-line agent in July, and released a chatbot called Ask DoorDash in June that lets users place orders using prompts and photos. It has also released an MCP that enables ordering from other chatbots for corporate customers.

In other words, the company is hedging: it is not seeing meaningful demand from outside agents yet, but it is preparing its own infrastructure for a world in which ordering happens through conversational and automated interfaces.

Retailers remain split on agent access

The broader landscape is still unsettled, as websites decide whether to let autonomous agents access their content and services at all. TechCrunch notes that Amazon has been blocking personal shopping agents, while Walmart has taken the opposite approach and rolled out a welcome mat in an effort to win business away from competitors.

Why it matters

DoorDash's figure is one of the first quantified public disclosures about how much agentic commerce is actually happening on a large consumer platform, and the answer is: almost none of it. Several hundred orders against roughly 3 million daily deliveries is a rounding error, and it sharply tempers the narrative that agents are already reshaping how people buy things online.

But the number cuts both ways. Xu's comments suggest DoorDash treats agent-driven ordering as inevitable in the long run — hence its own text-to-order agent, CLI tool, chatbot and MCP integration — and the company sees potential upside in advertising within third-party agents rather than resisting them. If agent order volumes climb quickly from this baseline, the disclosure becomes a useful benchmark for tracking adoption. If they stay flat, it will stand as evidence that the agentic commerce hype ran well ahead of user behaviour.