On Q3 calls, shopping agents were referrers more than buyers

DoorDash chief executive Tony Xu has put a number on what personal AI assistants have bought through his platform: "maybe several hundred orders in total", as Hospitality.today reports (opens in a new tab). Airbnb chief executive Brian Chesky, according to the same report, cited "very, very low numbers" of bookings from Meta's Muse and Instinct agents. Neither figure is a rounding error on a large base. Both are close to nothing.

They come from the Q3 earnings season, the first cluster of operator disclosures on how much personal agents actually buy. Booking Holdings' Glenn Fogel said, per Hospitality.today, that adoption of horizontal personal agents "may be much slower than is anticipated". Hospitality.today adds that Booking has its own reasons for saying so.

Taken together, the calls point to a split. Personal agents appear to be altering how shoppers arrive at a merchant much more than how they pay once there. The sale, in these accounts, is still completed on the merchant's own checkout or in a flow the platform has approved. That is what executives say, not an independent measurement, and it describes the present, not where adoption heads.

Finding, not paying

Shopify's account fits. According to Hospitality.today, president Harley Finkelstein called Q3 the first time shoppers experimented with letting personal agents buy for them, and said AI-channel orders were up 3.3x year on year. Shopify does not disclose AI's share of orders, so the multiple comes with no absolute figure. The company also says shoppers sent by AI to a product page convert 64% more often. That is a claim about arriving at a merchant, not about an agent paying.

Older evidence, from earlier this year, points the same way. Walmart executive Daniel Danker told WIRED in March that purchases completed inside ChatGPT converted at about a third of the rate of click-throughs to Walmart.com. Hospitality.today says Walmart's own assistant, Sparky, now runs inside ChatGPT with the sale going through Walmart's system, and that Etsy told Modern Retail the feature did not generate a large volume of sales. Hospitality.today also reports that since 20 February, eBay's user agreement has barred agents that buy on a shopper's behalf, LLM-driven bots and any end-to-end flow placing orders without human review, unless eBay gives permission.

What cuts the other way

Growth could change the picture. Shopify's 3.3x is a multiple without a stated base, and Finkelstein described Q3 as the first time shoppers tried delegated buying. A small number that multiplies quickly does not stay small for long.

The sources also have limits. Hospitality.today itself notes that most figures are self-reported or come from firms selling into the answer, and that every platform reporting small outside-agent numbers is building its own agent. A Checkout.com survey, a payments vendor's own research, found US and UK merchants saying AI agents were involved in 3% of their transactions, far above the executives' impressions. Definitions may account for part of that gap: Shopify's CFO said definitions of agentic commerce "vary from vendor to vendor". For scale, Visa's December 2025 milestone was hundreds of purchases in closed pilots.

So the figures are not comparable enough to settle the question. They do lean one way: where an operator reports agent-completed orders, the count is in the hundreds or described as very low.

Absolute order counts from Shopify and others in later quarterly calls would show whether that changes, as would any spread of eBay-style approved-agent rules.

On these company-reported accounts, the agent looks so far like a new front door to a checkout that merchants and platforms still run, which would put protocol and payment products built on agents initiating the purchase ahead of the volume operators report, and leave the merchant deciding where a sale closes.