When autonomous systems fail to generate revenue, unit economics break down before infrastructure investments can be recovered. DoorDash revealed during its third-quarter earnings call that it has only seen several hundred orders from third-party agents like Muse, Instinct, and Fo. For comparison, as the report shows, the company completes an average of 3 million deliveries daily. Are early volumes irrelevant given that foundational infrastructure for autonomous commerce is still actively being built by major players?
As DoorDash CEO Tony Xu stated, using agents to order is still a very dynamic area. If you look at where AI agents are today, we are seeing maybe several hundred orders in total from some of these third-party agents. As Tony Xu commented, users are still predominantly placing orders through DoorDash’s app.
Proprietary Tools and Strategic Divergence
Companies are deploying internal engineering resources while monitoring whether external traffic materializes. DoorDash launched a text-to-order agent in September, followed by a CLI agent in July. The company also introduced a chatbot called Ask DoorDash in June, which allows users to place orders through prompts and photos, alongside an MCP release to enable ordering from other chatbots for corporate ordering.
> “I would say that this [using agents to order] is something that is still a very dynamic area. And 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,” as DoorDash CEO Tony Xu stated in an answer to an analyst’s questions about the topic.
Different retail platforms approach external automation through opposing operational postures. Amazon has been blocking personal agents from accessing its content, while Walmart has laid out a red carpet for personal agents in order to snag some business from its competitors.
Capital Allocation and Infrastructure Reality
Evaluating whether to build parser endpoints for external LLMs requires measuring current API query costs against actual checkout conversion rates. Audit third-party agent referral traffic in weekly merchant analytics reports to isolate bot-driven conversion volume from human app sessions before expanding API maintenance budgets.
What doesn’t add up
The platform keeps testing the waters with dedicated tools — rolling out everything from its Ask DoorDash chatbot to integration protocols since June — yet actual shoppers stubbornly stick to the core consumer app. Burning development resources to accommodate external agents for trace amounts of volume creates an awkward gap between infrastructure maintenance and actual demand. Autonomous commerce is currently running up server tabs rather than ringing registers.