Xu’s discussion of “external agent” orders also does not include DoorDash’s internal AI tools. These include an “Ask DoorDash” feature the company launched this summer that can, for example, create an online shopping cart from a photo of a recipe or suggest an order based on a vague description like “dinner for a family of four.”
DoorDash hasn’t shared detailed statistics on that type of usage, but the company said last month that Ask DoorDash baskets are built “five times faster” than those that aren’t built, and Ask DoorDash orders “average nearly 50% more basket value and about 60% more unique items than traditional orders from the same consumers.” The company also said that nearly half of Ask DoorDash orders end up in “local places the consumer has never tried before,” which helps discover new restaurants in the area.
That’s all to say that DoorDash’s current experience with agent ordering may be a bit like Pizza Hut’s first tentative online ordering experiments in 1994. Back then, it would have been hard to imagine the world today, where more than half of Pizza Hut’s orders are placed online.
Perhaps ordering food and other goods using AI agents will be just as common in a few years, and we will look back on these early statistics with bewilderment. For now, however, Xu at least seems relatively calm with the early numbers.
“My take on anything related to technology is that you never want to fight gravity,” he said of AI agents. “But at the same time, you don’t want to fool yourself.”
