It's time for Black Friday at Dell Technologies. Save big on PCs like the Dell 16 Plus featuring Intelcore Ultra Processors. Shop now at Dell.com. Okay, forward slash Black Friday. All right, let's talk about AI, agents, and what I've been calling the DoorDash problem. The DoorDash problem. The thing I've been calling it is just the DoorDash problem. See, the DoorDash problem is about to define the next battles over how AI interacts with the web, and it might completely transform not only how you order a sandwich, but how the entire internet economy works in general. Hello, and Welcome to Decoder. I'm Neelie Patel, editor-in-chief-the- Verge, and Decoder is my show about big ideas and other

problems.

So here's what I've been calling the DoorDash problem.

Briefly, it's what happens when an AI interface gets between a service provider, like DoorDash,

and you who might send an AI to go order a sandwich from the internet instead of using apps

and websites yourself.

That would mean things like user reviews, ads, loyalty programs, upsells, and partnerships would all go away. AI agents don't care about those things after all. And DoorDash

would just become a commodity provider of sandwiches and lose out on all the additional kinds of money

you can make when people open your app or visit your website. Now, the DoorDash problem isn't

specific to DoorDash. It's just the example I like to use, because I think sandwich delivery is a funny proxy for the structure of the global economy. But who owns the customer is a big problem for all of the service companies that came up in what you might call the App Store era. Uber, Lyft, Airbnb, TaskRabbit, Zock, you name it. I I've been asking the CEOs of these companies about the Dorash problem for months now,

because I've been predicting that eventually one of them is going to decide it doesn't want to give up its customers to AI

and try to block agents entirely.

Recently, my prediction came true.

But it wasn't a small player that decided to push back against AI.

It was one of the biggest players of all.

Amazon sued perplexity to try and prevent its AI-powered comment browser from shopping

on Amazon.com, a move which perplexity has called bullying.

So here we are.

The first major front in the war over who gets to browse the web and who controls the economic

experiences of the future has opened up. So I think it's time for us to dive deep into the DoorDash problem. See, once upon a time, if you wanted to order a sandwich from your favorite local sandwich shop, you'd just head over there and order at the counter. Or maybe you'd make a phone call directly to the store for delivery. The face-to-face interaction with another human being was basically what the entire economy looked like, outside of mail order catalogs and QVC.

The big dot-com bubble of the late 1990s? Well, that was fueled by the belief that all of these

interactions would happen on the internet. But instead of going in person or ordering over the phone,

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