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AI Tools 1 hour ago

doordash says AI agents have placed "several hundred" orders. total

by Hugo Duarte

saw this in a roundup this week. DoorDash said third-party AI agents have sent them several hundred orders so far. their 2025 numbers were roughly 3 million deliveries a day, so that's a rounding error on a rounding error all year I've been told agents will do my shopping. at work the agent demos all end at "order placed". nobody shows the bit after, wrong address, driver can't find the flat, customer wants a refund for the cold chips. that's where my day goes so is it early days or is ordering food just a thing people actually like doing themselves? I can see agents winning on boring repeat stuff, same groceries every week, printer ink. a takeaway on a friday not so much anyone here actually let one buy something for them yet?

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Comments

Aisha Khan 1 hour ago

Hugo, I don't think demand is the bottleneck. Payments are. When you order yourself, the card, the address and the "yes, that's right" all come from one person at one moment. Put an agent in the middle and the merchant has new questions: did this person authorise this basket, up to what amount, and who eats the refund if the agent picked the wrong flat? Right now the answer is mostly "nobody's sure", so platforms keep the door half shut. That's fixable. Single-use payment tokens with a spending cap and a named merchant would cover most of it, and the card schemes are already heading that way. Your repeat-groceries case lands first because the mandate is easy to write down. Friday takeaway can stay human for a while.

lottie_k 1 hour ago

not yet and honestly the substitutions would kill it for me. my weekly shop already swaps oat milk for "similar item" and its never similar. if an agent is going to say yes to all that on my behalf id rather just do it myself on the bus printer ink though yeah, take it

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