DoorDash Says Agentic Traffic Is Low, but AI Gains Are Not

DoorDash Says Agentic Traffic Is Low, but AI Gains Are Not

Artificial intelligence is showing up for DoorDash. It’s just not agentic … yet.

While the fight for agentic commerce gears up, DoorDash CEO Tony Xu said on the company’s second quarter earnings call that agentic order volume from AI partners remains low. He said the gap traces back to most AI platforms prioritizing enterprise customers and coding tools over physical fulfillment. DoorDash’s own AI tools, meanwhile, are already producing results, from an ordering agent that builds a grocery cart in under two minutes to automated catalog building for new merchants.

For DoorDash, every AI shopping assistant eventually has to hand off to something physical. Someone has to check what’s actually in stock, route an order to the right merchant, load a bag correctly, and figure out what happens when a delivery goes to the wrong doorman inside a high rise.

Xu spent part of the call arguing that this handoff is the part of agentic commerce nobody has solved. He framed the coming years as a fight between two forces. One is the battle for attention, playing out now among chat assistants and AI platforms. The other is what he called the battle for atoms, the physical infrastructure needed to deliver something. DoorDash is betting its future on winning the second fight regardless of who wins the first.

Where AI Is Showing Up in the Business

DoorDash’s own AI tools are already running, even if outside agentic traffic hasn’t arrived. DoorDash Ask, the company’s ordering agent, helps customers discover restaurants similar to ones they’ve ordered from before and assemble a grocery cart in under two minutes. Xu described the tool as solving a specific pain point in a marketplace that has grown too large to browse manually.

On the merchant side, DoorDash uses AI to automate catalog building, generating photos and metadata for retailer and restaurant listings so new merchants launch faster. Xu said that speed translates directly into faster same-store sales growth once a merchant goes live. The company has also applied AI to Dasher routing, helping delivery workers find the most efficient areas to work.

“Whenever you’re reducing friction in a product, you get more usage,” Xu told analysts, describing how AI tools compound rather than cannibalize existing demand. He said easier grocery cart building doesn’t change advertising economics, it simply produces more orders and more advertising opportunities because people order more often as a result.

Growth Broadens Beyond the Core Restaurant Business

DoorDash’s restaurant business accelerated from the first quarter into the second, driven largely by Dashpass subscriber growth. CFO Ravi Inukonda said the company added more paid subscribers over the past year than in the two prior years combined, with subscriber growth in the U.S. among the highest DoorDash has recorded in several years.

New verticals outside restaurants, including grocery and retail, are growing faster than the core restaurant business and remain on track to turn gross profit positive by the end of the year. Basket sizes are increasing as customers who join through restaurant orders adopt grocery and retail categories over time, according to Inukonda, a pattern the company says holds across both older and newer customer cohorts.

International growth accelerated as well. Deliveroo posted its highest volume and subscription growth in several years, which Xu attributed to lessons DoorDash learned integrating its 2021 acquisition of Wolt. He said the majority of DoorDash’s international business sits in its top 10 markets outside the U.S., where the company holds either the leading position or a strong second place.

DoorDash reported second quarter revenue of $4.5 billion, up 36% year over year, or 24% excluding the impact of Deliveroo. Total orders grew 27% year over year to 970 million, or 17% excluding Deliveroo. Marketplace gross order value grew 36% year over year to $33.1 billion, or 23% excluding Deliveroo.

Free cash flow reached $742 million for the quarter, up from $355 million in the prior year period. Net cash from operating activities totaled $944 million. For the third quarter, DoorDash guided Marketplace GOV of $33 billion to $34 billion. The company is expecting fourth quarter margins to ease due to seasonal increases in Dasher costs and continued investment in autonomous delivery.