Basically no one is using AI agents for their DoorDash orders

Judgment

DoorDash CEO Tony Xu must decide whether to keep funding third-party AI-agent ordering and the MCP beta after only "several hundred orders" against just shy of 1 billion Q3 orders, or redirect that budget to internal Ask DoorDash, which shows stronger basket economics.

Basis

On DoorDash’s Q3 2026 earnings call, CEO Tony Xu said third-party AI agents generated “several hundred orders” since launch and called it a “very low use case” for a company that handled just shy of 1 billion orders total in Q3 2026. The mechanism is partly structural: DoorDash’s MCP connector was less than a month old, open only to a small number of early beta partners, and mainly used for corporate lunch orders; the third-party agent figure also excludes internal Ask DoorDash. DoorDash said Ask DoorDash baskets are built “five times faster,” and Ask DoorDash orders “average nearly 50% higher basket value and about 60% more unique items than the same consumers’ traditional orders,” with nearly half going to local spots the consumer has never tried. Xu added: “you never want to fight gravity,” but “you don’t want to be delusional.”