By Roman Aglaganov
For months the story of AI shopping agents has been told as a fight over access. Amazon blocked Meta’s Muse assistant from its store in September. Walmart, Shopify and Best Buy welcomed it. The assumption on both sides is that agents are coming and the only question is who lets them in. This week’s earnings calls suggest a less exciting truth: so far, few people are using them.
Several hundred orders
DoorDash told analysts this week that third-party agents such as Muse have placed “maybe several hundred orders in total”. In its 2025 report, the company said it completes an average of 3 million deliveries a day. Its chief executive, Tony Xu, put it well: you never want to fight gravity, but “you don’t want to be delusional” either.
Amazon’s Andy Jassy said the same thing the same day: few customers buy through outside agents because the experience is “still not great, nor more convenient than coming to a retailer directly.” He has an interest in saying so, since agents skip the adverts that make Amazon money, and Amazon is pushing its own agent instead. Meta, for its part, says more than 10 million people have set up Muse and that over a quarter of them use it to shop. Both things can be true: people try agents, and then mostly keep using the app.
The real competition
That should not be surprising. Reordering a takeaway on DoorDash takes a few taps. An agent saves time only when the task is tedious: comparing many shops, tracking a price, assembling a basket from five sites. For a single purchase from a shop you already use, an app built by the shop is hard to beat.
This matters because the access fight is shaping rules and terms of service now, on the basis of a future that has not arrived. Retailers are blocking agents to protect advertising and customer relationships; agent makers are signing partners to look inevitable. Neither has shown much evidence of what customers want.
What would help
If agents are to earn their place, they need to be clearly better at the jobs people dislike, and they need to be trustworthy: honest about which shops they check, clear about what they will buy without asking, and easy to stop. Retailers, meanwhile, should judge agents by whether they bring sales, not by whether they bypass ads. The several hundred orders are a useful reminder that the customer still gets a vote.
