Article 350: DoorDash Got Several Hundred Orders From AI Shopping Agents. Total.
On 29 October, DoorDash told analysts that AI agents shopping on a person's behalf - Meta's Muse, Instinct, Fo - have sent it several hundred orders in total. Not per day. In total.
Against roughly three million deliveries a day, that is a rounding error, and not a favourable one. Almost every order still comes through DoorDash's own app.
Amazon said the quiet part same day
Andy Jassy ruled the agents out as the cause of weaker third-quarter ad sales, and said outside agents win few buyers because the experience is "still not great, nor more convenient" than shopping with a retailer directly. Amazon blocked Muse from its store in September and is pushing its own Alexa for Shopping.
Two competitors, both with the transaction data, independently concluding the category is small. That is not a vibes problem. That is the number.
The tell is what they want to do next
DoorDash chief executive Tony Xu sees an opening later for DoorDash to advertise inside those agents. Read that twice. The pitch for shopping agents was that they would remove the shopping. The business model pitched for them is the same banner, one layer further in.
If the agent becomes the shopping surface and the retailer pays to be in its answer, the user has not been delivered from advertising. They have been delivered from browsing, still holding the ad.
Where this actually bites
The agentic commerce story has been told to investors and to shareholders mostly as narrative, and narrative has been cheap this year. DoorDash and Amazon just priced it at hundreds of orders. That does not mean the category is dead; assistants get better and payment flows are being wired up. It means the current gap between the story and the ledger is enormous, and only one of those two is audited.
Key Takeaway: several hundred orders against three million deliveries a day is not an early signal, it is a test that hasn't started. The interesting number in 2026 is not how many agents exist. It is how many people hand one their card.