DoorDash isn’t afraid of your AI agents

It now has more (human) users than ever.

The agents are coming, but the country’s biggest delivery app is fine with it.

At this week’s Google I/O developer conference, the tech giant shared plans for Gemini Spark, a “24/7 personal AI agent“ that works inside Google’s products like docs and Gmail, handling tasks on a user’s behalf, cleaning out inboxes, summarizing meetings, automating workflows. Spark follows the debut and subsequent explosion in popularity of OpenClaw, an open-source virtual AI assistant that lives inside chat and messaging apps. Agentic AI — bots that act for you instead of just talking to you — is moving fast from concept to product.

Agentic bots are practical. Users can ask for what they want in natural language and, provided it’s armed with the right information, the agent delivers. For example, you might give a bot access to your location, DoorDash login, and food preferences and tell it to order a pizza. It can, in theory, pick a restaurant, place an order, and get you a pizza. (I have not tried this yet but if you have please tell me!)

During an earnings call earlier this month, DoorDash reported record human interest in its platforms. The company recorded highs in both monthly active users and membership during the first three months of the year. It also reported $4 billion in revenue, up 33 percent year over year, and 933 million orders, a 27 percent increase.

But never mind those numbers, because Wall Street wanted to talk about AI! (Wall Street usually wants to talk about AI.) This time, analysts on the call wondered how agentic AI might help or hurt DoorDash’s future profits.

Is DoorDash worried, one analyst asked, that personal AI agents might layer themselves in between the on-demand marketplace and the consumer? Is DoorDash at risk of becoming a logistics offering to these agentic overlords?