DoorDash launches an AI agent that takes orders by text message
On September 30, DoorDash, the US home delivery platform, introduced a way to order without opening its app: you send it a text message with what you want, as you would to a friend, and its assistant searches, builds the cart and places the order.
It expands Ask DoorDash, the assistant it already had inside the app. According to the company, you can ask it for a specific dish or a local recommendation, and it searches nearby restaurants, suggests a cart and even sends photos of what it recommends. With "get my usual," it understands that you mean your regular Friday night order, customizations included. It also handles group orders with different food preferences, and the order is confirmed in the same conversation.
That said, for now it is a beta only for users in the United States, who have to sign up for a waitlist.
On the same day, it introduced another piece designed for businesses: a connector for corporate orders based on MCP (the open standard for connecting AI applications to external services). With it, a company's AI agents can search DoorDash, build the cart, place the order and track the delivery. It gives examples such as a Slack bot that collects the team's food orders or an agent that restocks the office when the drinks run out. It starts as a limited beta with a waitlist, with SpaceXAI, Vercel, Cognition, Tempo and Mercor among the first companies using it.
We believe the interesting part goes beyond delivery. We see large companies starting to open up their services for AI agents to use, both by message and from work tools, and it is a path worth following closely even though it has not reached Europe yet.
