OpenAI partners with food delivery giants

On October 10, OpenAI announced a partnership with food and grocery delivery services DoorDash, Grubhub, Uber Eats, and Instacart. According to OpenAI’s announcement, the integration is meant to let ChatGPT’s 800 million users order dinner or groceries in the chat. In this model of conversational commerce, users choose food in a conversation with the bot and pay in the service’s app.

The announced process includes buying groceries from a recipe. For example, ChatGPT will suggest a recipe for Thai green curry, identify the ingredients, find them at a local grocery store through Instacart, and help complete the purchase.

Another example of the announced process is a request for “late-night pizza near me.” The user will see real-time menus from DoorDash or Uber Eats. The AI will confirm the address and order details, then send the user to the delivery service’s app for final payment. This is the AI’s “agentic” capability: it moves from retrieving information to taking action to prepare an order.

For restaurants and retailers, the interface changes: guests interact with the delivery service through a conversation with ChatGPT. In our view, this could shift the contest for customer loyalty from the app screen to the conversation with the language model.