(Bloomberg) — DoorDash Inc. introduced an in-app artificial intelligence chatbot to help customers make restaurant and grocery orders, and suggested the technology could also be used to unlock new enterprise revenue streams.
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Users can launch the new Ask DoorDash tool via the “Ask” button in the app’s search bar, where they can interact with the chatbot using voice, written prompts or visual inputs. In addition to text responses, the answers include buttons that let users directly add items to their cart.
Recommendations are based on DoorDash customers’ past purchase behavior, as well as internet sources like social media reviews and blog posts. For grocery-related inquiries, the chatbot confirms with the user what pantry staples they already have before adding ingredients to the cart. It works on Apple Inc.’s iOS and is available in select markets. Initially, Ask DoorDash will be set up for restaurant search and grocery shopping. In the coming weeks, the assistant will expand to more users in the US and gain the ability to make restaurant reservations.
Early user tests of the chatbot point to tangible business gains, according to co-founder Andy Fang. “We’re seeing customers trying out new restaurants much more frequently through this experience than anything else we’ve tried to do in the app when it comes to ordering from restaurants,” he said in an interview. Nearly half of all takeout orders made with the tool were from a place the customer had never ordered from before, the company said.
“On the grocery side, we’re seeing significant increases in subtotals and that customers are actually able to build their cart five times faster using this experience than through the app,” Fang added. Grocery baskets built with the tool are more than 35% larger than typical grocery orders, DoorDash said.
Fang suggested the company is ready to sell its AI technology, including the chatbot, for corporate customers to use under their own brands. That sets up DoorDash for further competition with Instacart, which has been adding enterprise offerings for grocers like Kroger and Costco.
“Given all the technology that we’ve invested to making this work well, we’re also really excited to partner directly with grocers, restaurants, retailers to help them power their own agentic experiences as well,” Fang said.
DoorDash, the biggest food delivery app by US market share, is the latest among its peers to leverage existing data on restaurant menus, grocery items, stock levels and customer order history to better identify what users are likely to need. In April, Uber Technologies Inc. introduced an updated search bar that can interpret natural language and more flexibly show rides and takeout options, rather than defaulting to ride destinations.
Uber Eats also has an AI-based Cart Assistant to help people build their grocery carts through text or image queries. Instacart similarly accepts natural language search in its app, and its conversational cart-building product is available within the ChatGPT and Claude apps, as well as on other grocery sites.
DoorDash began working on a chatbot as early as 2023, Bloomberg previously reported. But the company didn’t release any such tool then because AI models at the time “weren’t capable enough” to make conversational ordering compelling for customers, Fang said. Today’s models have gotten a lot better, he added. “We just feel good now about the experience both in terms of the responsiveness of the product and also its ability to understand what you’re talking about and give you compelling suggestions.”
Ask DoorDash uses a combination of AI models from OpenAI, Anthropic PBC and Alphabet Inc.’s Google, as well as some open-source models to help reduce costs, according to Fang. “We feel confident it is going to pay for itself over time,” he said.
DoorDash’s other artificial intelligence experiment, the standalone social app Zesty, allowed the company to understand the types of questions that customers ask, while testing “the latest models in a way that was much faster” than if done within the flagship app, Fang said. DoorDash wound down Zesty in April, as it began integrating the chat features into the main app.
There is still merit in keeping the traditional keyword search, not least because it’s where DoorDash is using sponsored listings to boost its advertising business.
Searching using simple phrases is still an adequate experience for people who know exactly what they want, but Fang said “we’re going to work towards a solution where you don’t have to think about it ideally as a customer.” He added that users are already typing longer queries into the search box with the expectation that it can process their questions like AI chatbots, which can handle more nuanced queries.
“Certainly, we need to think about how ads fit into this ecosystem,” Fang said, addressing the tension between advertisers and customers using the ad-free AI search. “It is a complicated set of things for us to navigate, to be honest. The internet is changing underneath our feet, so we’re just trying to figure out how to move to where the puck’s going.”
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