AI could upend food delivery

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Delivery apps like DoorDash and Uber Eats have changed how diners eat and how restaurants operate. AI could force a new kind of reckoning for the industry.

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DoorDash, the leading food delivery app, processed 970 million orders in its second quarter this year and generated $4.5 billion in revenue. A 10-person startup called Bites is a blip in comparison: It has just around 300 restaurants signed up in the Bay Area, where it’s operating as a pre-seed startup. But this summer, Bites caught DoorDash’s attention.

In August, a slew of restaurants in the Bay Area received a strange email from DoorDash, warning businesses that they may be listed without their consent on Bites.

The form letter, copies of which were seen by The Verge, said that DoorDash had heard from “several partners” that were added to the third-party platform without their knowledge. DoorDash warned restaurants that they may not have agreed to Bites’ “terms, pricing structures, or service standards”; that they may not have control over the accuracy of their menu or hours of operation on Bites; and that, depending on the state, “such practices could be illegal.” The email included instructions on how to contact Bites to request removal.

One way to look at the warning is DoorDash proactively alerting its restaurant partners. But DoorDash going on the offense over a relatively small peer hints at a battle taking shape between established apps and newer, leaner startups looking to upend business in the age of AI.

Tech companies have promised that the future of AI is that ordinary people will have “agents” completing tasks: scheduling meetings, looking for deals on socks, sifting through their inbox and replying to emails, and yes, ordering food on their behalf. If this really does come to bear — if billions of people shift to interact with the internet not through search engines, webpages, and apps, but through large language models — those websites and services will lose control of the relationship with consumers as they stop visiting webpages and apps. What happens to Amazon when it can’t show shoppe

Bites’ pitch is simple: Companies like DoorDash are the middleman, forcing restaurants to raise prices to cover the commission the platforms take, leaving customers paying more to make up the difference. DoorDash fees for restaurants range anywhere from 15 to 30 percent per delivery order — the more in commission fees a restaurant forks over, the more diners they are visible to on the platform. Bites, on the other hand, touts simplified delivery and service fees and a flat $1 surcharge per order, which it says allows partners to keep item prices lower. (Diners typically pay the $1 fee, but som