SAN FRANCISCO–DoorDash has unveiled an artificial intelligence agent that lets customers order food through Apple’s Messages, building a cart and completing checkout—including making payment–without opening the delivery company’s app.
The company announced the text-to-order service Sept. 30 and opened a waitlist for a U.S. beta. The agent matches a customer’s phone number to a DoorDash profile, then uses order history, preferences and a stored payment method to help complete purchases, according to Bloomberg reporting cited by PYMNTS.
The launch expands Ask DoorDash, an assistant introduced within the company’s app in June, and reflects DoorDash’s broader effort to make ordering available through both its own AI tools and outside agents.
“Every other AI agent is meeting you for the first time. We’ve known you for years,” DoorDash co-founder Andy Fang said at the company’s Dash Forward event, according to Implicator reporting cited by PYMNTS.
Ordering Through Messages
Customers can request a particular dish, ask for a nearby restaurant recommendation or text “order my usual,” DoorDash said.
The agent searches nearby restaurants, reviews menus and proposes a cart. It can send food photos from restaurants’ DoorDash pages and accommodate different dietary needs within a group order. Customers confirm their purchases in the message thread before the agent completes checkout.
With permission, the agent also can initiate messages about a customer’s usual coffee order.
DoorDash said the average U.S. customer has access to more than 800,000 menu items and grocery products. Grocery baskets assembled through Ask DoorDash come together five times faster, while nearly half of restaurant orders placed through the assistant were from restaurants customers had not previously tried, according to the company.
More than 30% of grocery orders through the assistant are routine restocks, DoorDash said. A new one-tap prompt rebuilds those carts in the app, and the assistant searches for less expensive substitutions before checkout.
Early testing identified some inconsistencies. Bloomberg found prices in an early version of the text agent that differed from those in the app. DoorDash said customers admitted from the waitlist would receive a newer version, PYMNTS reported.
Opening Access to Outside Agents
DoorDash also is introducing a tool that allows workplace AI assistants to place orders without opening its app, according to Bloomberg reporting cited by PYMNTS.
A Slack bot, for example, could gather employees’ lunch requests and submit a group order. SpaceXAI, Cognition and Mercor already use the tool internally, Bloomberg reported.
