"Now we're seeing 50% higher grocery basket sizes versus non-AI orders. And people are checking out five times faster using AI than without AI," DoorDash co-founder Andy Fang said Sept. 23 at the Groceryshop conference in Las Vegas, describing the company's Ask DoorDash assistant, launched in June1. Shoppers using the tool also buy sixty percent more unique items than shoppers who skip it, DoorDash reported the same day.
Read straight, the numbers say something simple. An AI agent makes grocery shopping easier, and shoppers reward it with bigger orders. Turn them against how the tool earns money, and the story flips.
DoorDash takes a percentage of every order and every delivery fee. A basket that grows fifty percent means fifty percent more revenue moving through DoorDash's ledger, collected before the order reaches a customer's refrigerator. An assistant built to help a shopper finish a list fast has become an assistant built to keep adding to that list.
Fang has his own account of the mechanism. "AI is only as good as the data that's being fed to it," he said the same day1. DoorDash's delivery drivers photograph store shelves to keep product listings current, feeding the system in real time. Someone chooses that data. The engine deciding what belongs in a shopper's cart answers to the company collecting a percentage of the total, separate from the shopper watching a budget.
Grocery has run this experiment before. Self-checkout arrived promising the same kind of efficiency: less friction, fewer clerks, faster trips. Shoplifting at food retailers climbed 61.9 percent and at grocery retailers 58.8 percent in the years after self-checkout spread through the aisles.
VoCoVo, a retail-communications company, published the survey of 250 U.S. retail decision-makers on Aug. 13, 20263. Grocery workers absorbed the fallout. They faced roughly 59 hostile incidents a year each, on average, and 57 percent of food retailers reported employee resignations tied directly to customer abuse.
57 percent of food retailers reported employee resignations tied directly to customer abuse
Share of food retailers in VoCoVo's Aug. 13 survey of 250 U.S. retail decision-makers, percent
The full circle is every food retailer in the survey, and the magenta arc is the share that reported employees resigning over customer abuse.
Source: Yahoo Finance [3]. Chart by Ryan Elliott Dennis.
The numbers behind this chart
| Item | Value | Note |
|---|---|---|
| Reported abuse-driven resignations | 57% | Workers also faced roughly 59 hostile incidents a year each |
| Whole | 100% |
Rhode Island answered with law. Gov. Dan McKee signed a measure in June requiring one staffed lane for every three self-checkout stations. It became the first statewide rule of its kind, after UFCW Local 328 pushed the bill through the legislature4. "UFCW Local 328 members in the grocery industry are often overburdened with having to monitor too many self-checkouts while shoppers face delays," said Domenic Pontarelli, the local's secretary-treasurer.
The efficiency grocers bought at the register showed up later as a staffing bill, a security bill, and a public-relations problem. Workers paid it, and so did the shoppers the lanes were supposed to serve faster.
Mark Bartholomew teaches law at the University at Buffalo. He studies what changes when an algorithm makes the choice a person once made, standing in the aisle. "Without updated legal measures, this shift toward automated commerce could quietly erode the economic, psychological and social benefits that people receive from shopping on their own terms," he wrote in May2.
Bartholomew's argument leaves aside whether AI agents work. Ask DoorDash plainly works, by DoorDash's own count. His argument turns on who wrote the goals the agent works toward, and whether the shopper handing over the keyboard ever saw that list of goals.
Grocery shares this pattern across more than one company. Albert Heijn, the Dutch grocery chain, built its own AI assistant, Steijn. Its 1.1 million active users spend fifty-six percent more than shoppers who skip it, according to Groceryshop's own conference recap, published Sept. 295.
Shoppers using grocery AI assistants buy 50 to 60 percent more at DoorDash and at Albert Heijn
Percent more for AI assistant users than for other shoppers or orders, by company and measure
Each bar compares assistant users with other shoppers on one measure: DoorDash's unique items and basket size, and Albert Heijn's spending.
Sources: Supermarket News [1]; The Shelby Report [5]. Chart by Ryan Elliott Dennis.
The numbers behind this chart
| Item | Value | Note |
|---|---|---|
| DoorDash: unique items | 60% | Against shoppers who skip Ask DoorDash |
| Albert Heijn: spending | 56% | Steijn's 1.1 million active users, against shoppers who skip it |
| DoorDash: basket size | 50% | Against orders placed outside the AI assistant; checkout also runs five times faster |
Accenture told the same conference that seventy-five percent of consumers would trust an AI shopping agent more than their best friend. Fifty-six percent of loyal shoppers said they would switch brands the moment their agent recommended something else5. A shopping agent that most customers already trust more than their closest friend also decides which unfamiliar items land in a cart built partly from that trust.
DoorDash and the grocers on its platform profit from every basket the assistant grows, collecting a cut of the increase in real time. Shoppers carry the cost. Dollars land on a card, and items get added by a system built to add them, whether a household asked for more or needed less.
Grocery workers carried the last version of this bill, in hostile customers and in lanes they alone had to police. This industry has run the efficiency trade before and sent the bill somewhere else. Grocery is still deciding who receives this round's bill.
Fifty percent reads as convenience in the room where it was announced. It functions as revenue on the ledger that collects it. The man who built the assistant confirmed as much onstage, unchecked by anyone required to reconcile the receipt against the shopper who signed it.
Grocery workers already know this shape: self-checkout bought staffed lanes back through legislation after the automation proved expensive in a different aisle. Readers who want the next statistic before an industry finishes explaining it away can find it every weekday morning in The Signal, Ai Lately's free daily email. It delivers the number before the spin arrives.
Sources
- Supermarket News Staff, "DoorDash AI drives 50% bigger grocery baskets," Supermarket News, Sept. 23, 2026, https://www.supermarketnews.com/grocery-technology/doordash-ai-drives-50-bigger-grocery-baskets
- Mark Bartholomew, "What we lose when AI does our shopping," UB Now, University at Buffalo, May 1, 2026, https://www.buffalo.edu/ubnow/stories/2026/05/bartholomew-conversation-ai-shopping.html
- Supermarket News Staff, "Grocers want to use AI for anti-theft, worker abuse: report," Yahoo Finance, Aug. 13, 2026, https://finance.yahoo.com/technology/ai/articles/grocers-want-ai-anti-theft-170451877.html
- UFCW Staff, "Governor Dan McKee Joins UFCW Local 328 to Sign Rhode Island's Historic Self-Checkout Legislation," UFCW, June 25, 2026, https://www.ufcw.org/press-releases/governor-dan-mckee-joins-ufcw-local-328-to-sign-rhode-islands-historic-self-checkout-legislation/
- Shelby Team, "Groceryshop Wrapup: Grocery Leaning On AI As Shoppers Get Pickier," The Shelby Report, Sept. 29, 2026, https://theshelbyreport.com/2026/09/29/groceryshop-wrapup-grocery-leaning-on-ai-as-shoppers-get-pickier/
