Building an Autonomous Delivery Experience with DoorDash Co-Founders Andy Fang and Stanley Tang

**Sarah Guo** (0:05)
Hi, listeners, welcome back to No Priors. Today I'm here with Andy Fang and Stanley Tang, co-founders at DoorDash. We talk about how you can ask DoorDash in natural language for food and groceries, what that means for the future of agentic commerce, their delivery robot DOT, how DoorDash has been a robotics company for the last eight years, the data advantages of their network, and what all this means for nine million dashers and three billion deliveries a year. Welcome. Andy, Stanley, thank you so much for being here. We're really excited to talk to you about all the crazy stuff DoorDash is doing. I thought we could start with what's going on with agentic commerce at DoorDash. I feel like you have one of the largest rollouts of actually using AI to change what people consume. Yeah.
What was the backstory here?

**Andy Fang** (0:54)
I mean, it started a couple of years ago, honestly, in terms of our attempts to try to make a play here. It actually, originally, we were bullish on voice as the modality.

**Sarah Guo** (1:08)
That ended up not being the thing.

**Andy Fang** (1:09)
That ended up not being the thing, but maybe it will in the future, but that didn't really land. But the thing that was very interesting for us was just this natural conversational experience. I think what we've seen is people being able to just naturally just translate what's in their head into this interface versus trying to do some research online and then try to do some keyword optimization stuff. People just found it easier to search for things, either more nuanced restaurant discovery searches or different tasks on the grocery side.
Yeah, we've just seen a lot of interesting traction that's upheld as we've expanded the rollout.

**Sarah Guo** (1:51)
What are you seeing in terms of behavior change from the user side? Do I eat or buy differently?

**Andy Fang** (1:56)
Yeah, so I would say on the restaurant side, we are seeing 50 percent of trajectories of people using Ask DoorDash for restaurants.
50 percent of those trajectories are people ordering from places they've never ordered from before, which is huge, because that's one of the hardest metrics historically for DoorDash for us to move.
So that's been big. Then another one is on the grocery side, we're seeing a lot higher basket sizes. I would say 40 percent larger basket sizes on grocery. So people are like, they'll take a picture of what's in their fridge, and they'll say, help me stock up my fridge. Or they'll do meal planning with maybe they have some dietary constraints. Or they'll like, hey, I want to cook a pasta dinner this weekend with my family. Or even just like, hey, help me reorder my usuals. And that's a lot easier than tapping through the traditional experience.

**Sarah Guo** (2:47)
That's wild. I've never thought of DoorDash as difficult to use. But that suggests there's actually latent demand that wasn't being served because it wasn't easy enough to eat at new places.

**Andy Fang** (2:58)
Correct. Yeah. And I think a lot of people on the restaurant side, it's like people build habits. But I think people also want some diversity in terms of what they're eating.
And so we felt like this experience ended up being a natural way to allow people to express that.

**Sarah Guo** (3:15)
I was thinking about the social currency of like, my friend Andy found a new really good restaurant for me. Andy's awesome. So I feel like that's even a different way people look at DoorDash.

**Andy Fang** (3:26)
Yeah. Another thing that was an investment we made was actually incorporating world knowledge into the experience.

**Sarah Guo** (3:31)
What does that mean here?

**Andy Fang** (3:32)
Things that are going on with restaurants outside of DoorDash. So we'll see, hey, what's trending on the internet or what's stuff that's not in the models, but stuff that people would find because their knowledge cut off is too early.
But maybe it's like, hey, what's trending online or what are people talking about in various forums or whatever. And it goes to your point of like, hey, I want to eat what's cool. And so that was something we tried to incorporate into the experience to make people trust it more.

**Sarah Guo** (3:58)
How do you think people will buy or think about restaurants differently in five years from now?

**Andy Fang** (4:05)
I don't know about five years from now.

**Sarah Guo** (4:06)
I realize this was really hard in the age of AI. Next step.

**Andy Fang** (4:10)
So for Ask DoorDash, I would say to start with, maybe that's like the next couple months or so. I think it's making it easier for people to discover the experience and like figure out what to do. Because I think it can be intimidating if you just see like, hey, there's like suggested queries that you can type, but like some people don't know what to start with. So figuring out how to experiment and take care with the user experience to kind of get people or encourage people to find use cases for it.