DoorDash CEO Tony Xu reveals consumers are barely using automated software to place delivery orders

DoorDash co-founder and chief executive Tony Xu revealed during a third-quarter earnings call on Thursday that third-party AI agents have generated only several hundred orders across the entire time they have been operational. Xu described the activity as a very low use case compared to the delivery platform's overall scale, which approached 1 billion total orders in the third quarter of 2026 alone. [1][2]

Customers continue to rely almost entirely on the main DoorDash application instead of outside tools such as Muse, Instinct, and Fo. Xu noted that autonomous software might prove more useful for complex, long-consideration transactions where bots work proactively in the background, but simple tasks like meal delivery rarely prompt consumers to look beyond the platform. While DoorDash has introduced internal features like its Ask DoorDash chatbot in June, a command-line interface agent in July, and a text-to-order tool in September, Xu maintained that the company wants to stay realistic about current consumer adoption while leaving room for future advertising inside external systems. [1][2]