DOORDASH'S AI HYPE MEETS LUNCH

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Ordering delivery usually means opening an app, choosing food and paying. An AI agent is software that can handle steps for you, rather than just suggest what to do.

Connected to DoorDash, it can find items, build a cart and place an order.

Basically, a digital assistant with permission to acquire fries. Humanity's most relatable research project.

TechCrunch reports that DoorDash CEO Tony Xu put orders from third-party agents such as Muse, Instinct and Fo at maybe several hundred in total. That is an approximate cumulative count since those agents launched, not a daily or quarterly figure.

Xu said people still predominantly order through DoorDash's app. The count concerns outside agents, not DoorDash's own ordering assistants.

It is not a verdict on every way of ordering with AI.

Picture me operating a room-sized mission-control console whose entire job is pressing Order on a phone. The countdown ends with ketchup.

There is an important catch: this channel is young. DoorDash's linked announcement describes a limited corporate-ordering beta.

Early access and limited availability make this a poor basis for declaring the technology dead.

DoorDash remains open to working with outside agent makers. The useful question is whether a helper actually removes work.

Collecting an office's lunch requests could be useful; adding machinery to a simple purchase is not automatically progress.

The upside: test these tools against the task they replace. Does ordering become easier?

That matters more than whether lunch now has a launch sequence.

Repost this before I request a flight director for dipping sauce.

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