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Halfway through the week, folks.
Every agency deck this fall seems to have a slide about AI agents doing the shopping. DoorDash just put a number on it.
On October 29 the company agreed to buy Instacart for about $17 billion, Retail Dive reports. It's a retail media deal too. Instacart's advertising and other revenue was $331 million in the third quarter, roughly 30% of its total.
On that day's earnings call, an analyst asked about AI agents. CEO Tony Xu's answer, per TechCrunch: "you never want to fight gravity. But at the same time, you don't want to be delusional." DoorDash is "seeing maybe several hundred orders in total from some of these third-party agents," he said.
Several hundred. TechCrunch notes DoorDash completes an average of 3 million deliveries a day.
So on one day, a company committed $17 billion to a business where shoppers open an app and see ads, and said out loud that the agents barely order anything yet. Both things are true at once, and your budget should probably look like that too.
Xu didn't dismiss agents. He said customers still mostly order in DoorDash's own app, that the company wants a healthy relationship with the companies building agents, and that one day it might advertise inside them. That's the realistic order of events. The ad money stays where people are, then follows them when they move.
If you sell through retailers or delivery apps, note the timing. The deal isn't expected to close until the end of 2027 or the first half of 2028, and until then the two companies run separately. After that, I'd plan for one bigger ad platform with more pricing power.
And keep the agent work small and specific. Get your product data clean enough for an agent to read, then count what actually comes through.
How many orders did AI agents send your business last quarter, and does anyone on your team know?
ALSO TODAY
In a developer preview, Shopify mixes "promoted placements" into the results its catalog gives AI shopping agents and pays the agent's maker 0.3% of each promoted sale, SEJ reports.
Zocdoc has opened its platform to AI agents, which can now find doctors, check insurance and book appointments for patients, Adweek reports.
Walmart's Sparky agent can now turn a photo of a handwritten list into a cart, and Walmart hasn't said whether its picks include paid ads, PPC Land reports.
Today’s sponsor:
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TALK ON THE MARKET
Christopher Penn of Trust Insights, co-host of Marketing Over Coffee, on what "proactive" agents really are:
Keep that line handy for the next agent demo. Ask what triggers it, how often, and what it did last week that a person had to fix.
NUMBERS MATTER
10%. U.S. consumers who start product discovery with AI, in AlixPartners' 2026 Consumer Sentiment Index of more than 9,000 shoppers, per Retail Dive. It's 14% for Gen Z and millennials.
The report's warning for brands: "The machine doesn't read your beautiful imagery or your persuasive copy — it reads structured data: attributes, availability, price." The agent-readiness project is mostly a data job.
TRY THIS TODAY
Check whether every channel in your mix still earns its budget, before the platforms consolidate.
Using the attached 12 months of spend, revenue and new customers by channel, rank our channels by return and by cost per new customer.
Then show what moving 10% of budget from the weakest channel to the strongest would do, and what we'd have to believe for it to work.Paste in: a channel-by-channel export of spend, revenue and new customers for the last 12 months, reconciled with finance. You get back: a ranked channel table, one reallocation scenario and the assumptions behind it. The full Channel Mix Optimization prompt works through efficiency, constraints and test channels step by step.
CMO CORNER
Protect time like a strategic asset.
Agent commerce is the kind of topic that eats a leadership team's calendar. Every vendor has a demo, every board member read an article, and somebody wants a task force.
DoorDash's CEO just gave you permission to say no to most of it. Several hundred orders is a learning project, and it should get learning-project time.
So ring-fence it. Give agent readiness one owner and a fixed slice of their week, half a day, say, with two deliverables: clean product data and a monthly count of agent traffic and orders. Everything else on the topic goes to that person, not to your staff meeting.
Then spend the time you saved where the money is in November: retail media, your own app and email, and the holiday creative that's already late. Revisit the agent budget when that monthly count moves. The next headline doesn't count.
TOOL UPGRADE
Three tools for selling to the customers you can reach today, in channels you own:
Nuelink — best for e-commerce teams that want social posts generated and scheduled automatically from their Shopify product listings. Try Nuelink here →
Systeme.io — best for lean teams that want funnels, email and checkout in one place, starting on a free plan with 2,000 contacts. Try Systeme.io here →
GetResponse — best for e-commerce brands that need abandoned-cart and product recommendation emails without enterprise automation pricing. Try GetResponse here →
→ We have 300+ curated, filtered, and categorized AI tools in our directory. Browse to find the best ones that help your marketing team.
LEARN THIS
The AI Data Strategy Framework for Marketing is our method for building the data foundation AI runs on, from a maturity audit to integration, governance and standards. Use it before you spend on agent readiness, because an agent can only work with the product and customer data you give it.
First step this week: start the audit. List each big marketing decision, the data behind it, and whether that data is current, accurate and accessible. The framework puts it at two to three weeks for a cross-functional team of three or four.
→ We publish workshops, courses, guides, manuals, and more on AI marketing for free. Browse our learning resources for free.
BRAND SLOP
Apple launched the iPhone Duo, its first folding iPhone, on October 23. Within hours people were posting photos of broken inner screens, The Verge reports. Apple has acknowledged an "issue" affecting a "small number" of units and is replacing damaged ones. iFixit told The Verge the inner screen appears to press against part of the hinge.
Now the AI part. At the September launch, Apple's chief hardware officer, Johny Srouji, said: "During manufacturing, we use AI algorithms to precisely match each individual hinge with its best-fit housing to ensure perfect alignment." Futurism ran the headline you'd expect.
Nothing shows the algorithms caused the cracks. But put AI on stage as the reason a part is special, and every failure of that part reads as an AI failure. Which feature in your next launch are you crediting to AI?
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