DoorDash and Amazon say third-party AI shopping agents still bring in little business

Two of the largest US consumer platforms used their quarterly earnings calls this week to describe AI shopping agents built by other companies as a marginal channel so far. Their figures are worth noting, and so are their commercial interests.

DoorDash: a few hundred agent orders

Answering an analyst on the third-quarter call on October 29, DoorDash CEO Tony Xu said third-party agents have produced only several hundred orders in total since they started operating, TechCrunch and 24/7 Wall St. report. TechCrunch names Muse, Instinct and Fo among them. Xu called agentic ordering a fast-moving area but said most customers still order in DoorDash's own app.

The scale gap is large: 24/7 Wall St. puts DoorDash's third-quarter orders at 993 million. The count covers only outside agents. DoorDash runs its own AI ordering tools, including the Ask DoorDash chatbot launched in June and a text-to-order agent, and offers an MCP connector that other chatbots can use to place orders. Xu said the company wants to learn from these use cases and suggested that advertising inside agents could become an opportunity.

Amazon: agents "still not great"

On Amazon's call the same day, CEO Andy Jassy told investors that few customers buy through outside shopping agents, describing the experience as "still not great, nor more convenient than coming to a retailer directly," Fortune reports. He did not name Meta's Muse, which Amazon blocked from its store in September, saying such access would breach the conditions of use customers accept. Jassy also said outside agents were not behind the quarter's weaker-than-expected advertising results.

Instead, he promoted Amazon's own tools: more than 400 million customers used Alexa for shopping over the past year, he said, and US customers who use Amazon's shopping agent spend 50% more per order.

Why the framing matters

These statements are not neutral measurements. Fortune notes that Muse threatens Amazon because it bypasses the ads and site visits behind much of its profit, and both companies are pushing their own assistants. Meta tells a different story: Mark Zuckerberg said more than 10 million people in the US and Canada have set up Muse, that more than a quarter of users shop with it and that the average purchase exceeds $200. Walmart, Shopify and Best Buy have opened their doors to the agent. Neither report says over what period outside agents have had access, so the figures describe an early snapshot rather than a verdict on where agentic commerce is heading.