AI·DoorDashDoorDash CEO Tony Xu says path to autonomous deries filled with ‘lots of pain and suffering’ but company is nearing first inning of commercial gressBy Jessica MathewsBy Jessica MathewsSenior WriterJessica MathewsSenior WriterJessica Mathews is a senior writer for Fortune covering startups and the venture capital industry.SEE FULL BIO DoorDash CEO Tony XuStuart Isett/FortuneTony Xu, cofounder and CEO of food and grocery giant DoorDash, doesn’t sugar coat the company’s efforts, and challenges, autonomous dery nologies.
“Candidly, it’s mostly been filled with lots of pain and suffering,” Xu said in an on-stage interview on Monday at Fortune’s Brainstorm conference in Park City, Utah.
DoorDash has been working on autonomy and robotics nology since 2017, Xu said in what he described as a “long journey.” Any company trying to get involved in autonomous nology and do it at scale must master a variety of different skills, he said: “Imagine learning a new sport, but that sport has five different subdomains just to say that you’re a rookie at that sport.” You have to build the hardware, develop the software, and fine-tune the dery network, too—particularly in the instance that an autonomous dery vehicle ends up getting stuck and needing human intervention.
“It’s very rare that one company is equally good at all of those skills,” Xu said.
“I think we have the potential to be one of those companies, but I think we’re still very early in building the competence.” DoorDash has been taking a multi-nged apach—partnering with other companies on things robot and drone deries, but also some of its own autonomous nology in-house.
For example, DoorDash is working with Coco Robotics to test out robots that transport food and groceries via sidewalks in Los Angeles and Chicago, and it has been conducting drone deries with Alphabet drone subsidiary, Wing, in Australia.
Internally, the company has its own arm called “DoorDash Labs” where the company is working on prietary dery robots.
Xu said that those long-term investments the company started making eight years ago have started to pay off.
Those investments are “starting to actually get to maybe the first inning of commercial gress.” When asked where customers could experience some of these forms of autonomy in the U.S., Xu specified that there are no formal autonomous commercial operations just yet.
“We don’t have it yet operating today. A lot of it is in test forms,” Xu said.
But he pointed out that drone ders are happening in Australia and that DoorDash has started to get the permits necessary to start doing drone deries in “select cities” in the U.S.
Thus far, there is no specific timeline—or, at least, not one Xu is ready to talk publicly. “Let’s see how fast the team can der,” he said.Fortune Global Forum returns Oct. 26–27, 2025 in Riyadh.
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