With text-to-order, DoorDash moves beyond the app
DoorDash unveiled a new way for customers to order food delivery on Tuesday. Instead of opening the app and searching for a restaurant, customers will be able to send a text to DoorDash with what they want.
“We’re going to continue to serve merchants and be able to stay relevant in the services that matter most to consumers,”
DoorDash’s AI agent will then find that item, build the order, and check out, using the customer’s stored payment info.
Customers can also text DoorDash for recommendations for what to eat. And because it has a memory of the customer’s ordering history, its responses are tailored to their tastes.
During a demo at DoorDash’s Dash Forward product event this week, Aayush Sheth, DoorDash’s head of applied AI, used Text DoorDash to reorder his usual breakfast burrito.
“I don’t have to open the app, add all my customizations, remember what I even ordered last time,” he said. “It’s right here on text message.” The process took about a minute.
He also demonstrated more complex tasks, such as asking DoorDash to recommend a meal for a group in which one person doesn’t like mushrooms and another has high cholesterol and wants something with soy.
And he showed how customers can text DoorDash to order the groceries they need by asking it to look up a recipe and uploading a picture of their refrigerator.
In the future, customers will also be able to text DoorDash to make reservations, process returns, and communicate with their delivery person.
“We want to make it as frictionless as possible for users to come back,” Sheth said.
Text DoorDash follows the launch of Ask DoorDash, an AI chatbot embedded in the DoorDash app that is designed to help users narrow down nearby dining options.
Both offer customers an alternative to scrolling and tapping through the DoorDash app to order meals or groceries. The idea to make ordering more convenient. And it is also changing how they choose what to eat.
For instance, more than half of orders placed on Ask DoorDash go to a restaurant the customer has not been to before, said DoorDash co-founder Andy Fang. And when users text DoorDash for a recommendation, “it doesn’t just go to the name brands,” Sheth said. “It’s able to actually go to the mom-and-pop shops around the corner to help support these local economies.”
Ask DoorDash went live in select markets in June, while texting is currently being used by about 20,000 consumers, with a waitlist open now.
These new ordering modes could have implications for restaurants. When a customer opens the DoorDash app, they enter a classic e-commerce marketplace, with carousels of different cuisines, popular restaurants, and deals and promotions. Restaurants and other businesses can pay to get a more prominent position on the app. It gives restaurants an audience they would otherwise not be able to reach.
Ask DoorDash and Text DoorDash provide a more curated experience for customers. The AI models surface different restaurants than what the customer might see on the app. And restaurants cannot pay to appear in the results, at least for now.
Meanwhile, DoorDash is giving restaurants other ways to reach customers beyond the marketplace. Also at Dash Forward, it introduced a product called DashOS, a system that brings together all of DoorDash’s channels — third-party delivery, online ordering, reservations, and more — into a unified marketing platform for operators. The idea is to allow restaurants to more easily convert customers who order through the DoorDash app into first-party channels like dine-in or web ordering.
That means a customer who opts in to a restaurant’s loyalty program on the DoorDash app might later get an email with the restaurant’s new menu, and then an invite to a VIP wine tasting, for example.
All of this could change to how restaurants use DoorDash to reach new customers and grow their business.
Parisa Sadrzadeh, DoorDash’s vice president of strategy and operations, said in an interview that she could not say definitively how that might change, noting how rapidly things like AI are evolving. But she said there will be plenty of opportunities for restaurants to attract new customers with DoorDash, including with DashOS.
“We’re going to continue to serve merchants and be able to stay relevant in the services that matter most to consumers,” she said. “On the flip side, we’re going to continue to be a really great platform for restaurants … to build relationships with consumers.”
She added that there are more announcements to come related to ads, marketing, and other agentic services for businesses.
