DoorDash's AI ordering tool is pulling customers toward restaurants they have never tried before

Two metrics from Ask DoorDash stand out. Co-founder Andy Fang says that half of restaurant order sessions through the agentic interface end with the customer ordering from a place they have never ordered from before. On the grocery side, he says orders placed through Ask DoorDash produce basket sizes roughly 40% larger than orders placed without it. Both figures point in the same direction: the tool is expanding behavior, not just automating existing behavior.

My prediction actually is in a world where robotics, drones, AI is everywhere, my guess is that in 10 years time we're actually going to have more Dashers doing deliveries, not less. Andy Fang

Co-founder Stanley Tang adds a separate data point relevant to autonomous delivery. DoorDash, he argues, holds proprietary drop-off location data covering “that first and last 100 ft problem” that “doesn’t exist in Google Maps” and exists only on DoorDash. That data, in his framing, is a meaningful moat as robotics and drones enter the picture. He is also skeptical of sidewalk robots for DoorDash’s core use case, arguing that a 2 mph form factor cannot cover a typical 3-to-5-mile delivery in 15 minutes.

On the workforce question, Fang takes a counterintuitive position: more automation will mean more human Dashers, not fewer, over the next decade. That is a speculative call, and he frames it as his personal guess rather than a company projection. Worth flagging all the same.