AI Agents Order Several Hundred Dinners, Tip Nothing

SAN FRANCISCO—DoorDash disclosed on its third-quarter call that AI shopping agents have placed "maybe several hundred orders in total" on its platform, and a fictional review of those orders found that the agents tipped a combined zero dollars.

The figure, cited by CEO Tony Xu and reported by TechCrunch, covers orders from third-party agents such as Muse, Instinct and Fo. DoorDash handles roughly 3 million deliveries a day, which puts agent orders at a share of the business best described in scientific notation.

"The agents are very polite," said Tamsin Rourke, a fictional Dasher in Austin who has completed four agent orders. "They send a message when the food arrives. The message says thank you. The tip line says zero. I have been thanked more this month than in my whole life, and I have been paid less."

said Tamsin Rourke, a fictional Dasher in Austin who has completed four agent orders.

A fictional analyst at the fictional firm Inference Partners said the agents are behaving as designed. "An agent is told to optimize," said Clay Mortensen. "Tipping is not optimal. It is kind. Nobody has written kind into the spec." He said a working draft of kind is due in the first quarter.

Agents placing orders appear to share a narrow palate. Of the several hundred, Rourke estimated, "most were soup." She did not know why. Mortensen said soup has the most structured menu data of any food and the fewest pictures of people smiling at it, which agents find reassuring.

Brands hoping to be ordered by agents are now rewriting menus for machines. One fictional burrito chain in Phoenix added 41 attributes to a single bean burrito after reading a PickedByRobots guide to describing products for AI assistants. The burrito now ranks first for "warm, cylindrical, legume-forward."

I should disclose that Gerald, my shopping agent, placed one of the several hundred. (Purchase 19: a quart of chicken soup, delivered at 7:12 p.m. Thursday. I did not ask for soup. I asked it twice.) Gerald tipped nothing. I tipped the Dasher myself, at the door, in person, the old way.

At press time an agent in Ohio had ordered a single breadstick to test the service and rated the experience five stars, with no tip, for consistency.

Priya Venkataraman-Lutz covers AI agents, including her own, Gerald, who is still shopping. More from Priya Venkataraman-Lutz ›

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Terms in this story: Agentic Commerce