DoorDash has had only several hundred orders from AI agents

What happened

On its third-quarter earnings call, DoorDash said it has seen only "several hundred" orders from third-party AI agents, according to TechCrunch. The agents named in the report include Muse, Instinct and Fo. For comparison, TechCrunch notes that DoorDash's 2025 report put its average at 3 million deliveries a day.

An analyst asked about the topic, and chief executive Tony Xu answered. "My take on all things technology is you never want to fight gravity. But at the same time, you don't want to be delusional," he said. He added that, looking at where AI agents are today, the company is seeing "maybe several hundred orders in total" from some of these third-party agents.

Xu also said users still place orders predominantly through DoorDash's app. The company wants to learn more about agentic use cases and develop a healthy relationship with third-party agent makers. According to the report, he said there could be an opportunity in the future to advertise within those agents.

What it means if you build agents

The loud version of the story is that agents are about to take over commerce. The number from a company that completes around 3 million deliveries a day points the other way: orders placed through outside agents are still a tiny fraction of its volume. That is useful to know before you plan a product around it.

It is also worth noticing what DoorDash is doing itself. According to TechCrunch, it has a text-to-order agent launched in September, a CLI agent introduced in July, and a chatbot called Ask DoorDash launched in June that lets users place orders through prompts and photos. It also released an MCP to enable ordering from other chatbots for corporate ordering.

The access question is unsettled. TechCrunch reports that websites are still deciding whether to let agents access their content: Amazon has been blocking personal agents, while Walmart has laid out a red carpet for them. If your agent depends on a site letting it in, that site's policy decides whether it works.

One reading is to be wary of agents whose job is to roam the open web on a stranger's behalf, and to look instead at tasks inside your own business, where you decide what the agent can touch.

For freelancers and owners, few orders from agents does not mean agents are useless. It means the consumer-ordering use case is small today, while the admin that eats your week is not waiting on anyone's marketplace.

Where Tool & Loop fits

Tool & Loop teaches agents that take a job off your list: quote a customer, chase an invoice, cut a video, check their own work. Those are jobs on your own list rather than on someone else's platform, which is the opposite of sending an agent somewhere that may or may not let it in.

The DoorDash figures are a useful reminder to build for work that exists now. Agent-based ordering is still evolving, according to TechCrunch. In the meantime, the jobs on your own list are a sensible place to put an agent to work.