Not sure what you want to order for dinner tonight? DoorDash has you covered with its new ‘Ask DoorDash’ feature.
This is a “new conversational way to search the app in your own words through chat, voice, a recipe link or photo”, according to the company’s CTO Andy Fang. It can also build you a grocery cart, about 5x faster than doing it manually, and it takes a single prompt to complete your prompt in under 2 minutes.
Fang also mentioned in his tweet that in early testing, nearly half of all restaurant orders made with Ask DoorDash were from a place the customer had never ordered from before, and grocery baskets built with this feature were over 35% larger than those without.
This shows that it’s going to open up more restaurants for users to try out, while also spending more money on groceries. That’s good for both customers and partners. Speaking of which, Fang also said that for a restaurant, this can boost your visibility with the improved, personalized discovery experience.
This is AI without the slop
These days, a lot of companies are adding AI everywhere into their apps. But DoorDash has done this in a smart way, which is going to help customers find what they’re looking for faster, instead of browsing the app for an hour looking for something to eat. It’s also helping with visibility and discovery of lesser-known restaurants that a DoorDash customer might not have heard of before.
This is the kind of useful AI we’ve been looking for. Not adding AI to an app just because it’s the current buzzword, and not filling the app with AI slop (like Google Health). Instead, it lives in a new “Ask” button in the search bar, which you can open at anytime to have a chat about what to order.
