Overview
- DoorDash announced Thursday that Ask DoorDash is rolling out in a limited iOS test that currently supports restaurant search and grocery cart building with broader U.S. access and reservation features coming in the next few weeks.
- The chatbot accepts plain-language prompts, voice, photos of recipes or lists, and recipe links to assemble grocery carts and suggest restaurant orders based on a user’s past orders and stated preferences.
- DoorDash reported early-test signals that nearly half of restaurant orders placed through the tool came from restaurants new to the customer and that grocery baskets built with the feature were roughly 35% larger than typical carts.
- The launch follows DoorDash’s recent merchant AI tools and acquisitions such as SevenRooms and Deliveroo and is part of a planned tech-stack overhaul that the company says requires substantial near-term investment.
- The move places DoorDash alongside competitors including Uber Eats and Instacart in a wider industry push to add conversational AI assistants to shopping apps and could change discovery, cart sizes, and merchant visibility if user testing scales.