Almost nobody uses AI agents to order food or rides on apps like Uber

• AI agents aren't taking off on apps like Uber and DoorDash.
• The AI tools have generated hundreds of food and ride-hailing orders, the companies said.
• Shoppers have said that agents can make mistakes and need guardrails to be useful.

AI agents aren't getting much love from restaurant patrons or ride-hailing passengers.

Despite predictions that agents will revolutionize ordering stuff online, both Uber and DoorDash mentioned on their latest earnings calls that they've received hundreds of orders through AI agents like Meta's Muse or Instinct.

Those are tiny numbers compared to the millions of rides and deliveries that the companies complete each day.

For example, Uber provided 320 million ride-hailing and delivery trips during the last week of October, CFO Balaji Krishnamurthy said on Uber's third-quarter earnings call on Wednesday. It was "one of our largest weeks" thanks to Halloween orders, Krishnamurthy said.

Only about 500 of those Uber Eats orders came from AI agents, he said. And agents were the source of four ride-hailing trips during the week.

"It is very, very early, and very limited traction that we have seen so far," Krishnamurthy said.

The comments came a week after DoorDash CEO Tony Xu said that his company had received "several hundred orders in total" from AI agents. That's a sliver of the billions of orders that DoorDash delivers annually.

Some AI users have put agents in charge of buying everything from plane tickets to groceries for them. Shoppers have also said the tools are useful for monitoring prices. Ordering errors and fears about the agents going rogue with credit card details have led others to use them more cautiously, Business Insider previously reported.

Even with limited usage, both Uber and DoorDash are moving ahead with AI tools on their own apps.

DoorDash said in September that it was testing a text-to-order feature that allows users to bypass the company's app, for instance.

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