The other side of the checkout

On October 21, Meta gave the demand side of its agent story: more than 10 million Muse activations in the US and Canada, shopping as its most common use, and an average above $200 among engaged shoppers. It did not disclose a transaction count. Ten days later, WIRED examined the merchant side, drawing on earnings calls and conversations with executives at roughly 50 companies.

DoorDash CEO Tony Xu supplied one of the few concrete order figures. He said third-party agents — including Muse and competing services — had placed perhaps several hundred orders in total. DoorDash reported 993 million orders across its business in the third quarter of 2026, but the periods and populations are not directly comparable. The useful conclusion is narrower: DoorDash described agent-originated activity as small, without disclosing a Muse-specific count or a time period for the cumulative figure.

The rest of the answers WIRED collected were adjectives, not numbers. Hilton called agent bookings "insignificant". eBay called the activity "very, very small". Ally Financial called it "quite low". T-Mobile said it had not seen "anything of significance" from agents. Life Time, where the feared use case was agents cancelling unused memberships, said it had seen zero cancellations from agents — a cancellations figure, not a sales count, but the same direction. Public Storage and Hartford Insurance offered similar readings to WIRED, and Eternal, the Indian delivery company, estimated agentic commerce at "close to zero".

An average without a volume

These findings do not necessarily contradict Meta's disclosures. Meta described Muse activations, shopping usage and average spending among engaged shoppers. WIRED's merchant interviews describe the amount of agent-originated business individual companies can identify. Those are different populations and different measures. Without a Muse-specific completed-order count, neither side establishes how much commerce Muse is generating across its retail partners.

Wall Street's worry, as WIRED frames it, was that proactive shopping agents would erode brand loyalty, start price wars and squeeze margins. Nothing in the merchant answers suggests that pressure has arrived yet.

There is also a gap in the middle that neither side has filled. Meta's retail partnerships cover 10 companies, including Walmart, Best Buy and Gap. WIRED notes that many of them last reported earnings before Muse launched, so they have shared no Muse figures at all. The companies with fresh numbers are mostly companies Muse was supposed to disrupt, reporting that little has arrived. The companies best placed to confirm Meta's shopping claim have not yet reported.

There is an important distinction between AI-assisted discovery and autonomous checkout. WIRED also reported that Costco and Extra Space Storage are seeing growth in sales originating from AI chatbots such as ChatGPT and Gemini. Those referrals are not equivalent to orders completed by autonomous agents. The merchant responses therefore suggest that AI may already be influencing where purchases begin, even while agent-executed transactions remain limited in the examples disclosed.

Why the sites are being rebuilt anyway

The most useful detail in WIRED's reporting is not a quote about volume. It is Chipotle explaining why agent orders fail. The chain found agents struggling to finish purchases when a loyalty discount had to be applied, or when an order was placed after hours. Its response was not to block agents. It is cleaning up its website code so agents can navigate it.

That response explains the apparent contradiction in the piece. Merchants can honestly report negligible agent business and still spend money preparing for agents, because the cost of being unreadable to an agent is asymmetric: trivial orders today, a missing storefront if the habit forms.

Chipotle said Muse's debut increased its agentic orders by a single-digit percentage, but did not disclose the starting volume or resulting order count. The percentage therefore cannot establish whether the activity is commercially significant. The company is nevertheless making its website easier for agents to navigate, including checkout situations involving loyalty discounts and orders outside operating hours.

For anyone judging agentic commerce from the outside, the next useful evidence will be completed orders, bookings and revenue attributable to specific agents, measured over defined periods. WIRED's reporting provides an early check on merchant experience, not a representative estimate of the market. Across the companies it examined, executives generally described activity as limited, but the figures are too sparse and inconsistent to calculate an overall adoption rate.

Sources

  1. [1] WIRED, "Meta's Muse Could Upend All Kinds of Businesses. It Hasn't Yet", October 31, 2026 (read first-hand via the full syndicated text on Technologist Mag, which reproduces WIRED's article under its byline; the WIRED original is paywalled. Source for: the roughly-50-company scope across earnings calls and conversations; DoorDash's agent orders described as in the "hundreds"; Hilton "insignificant"; eBay "very, very small"; Ally Financial "quite low"; T-Mobile "haven't seen anything of significance"; Life Time "seen zero" cancellations; Public Storage and Hartford Insurance's similar readings; Eternal "close to zero"; Meta declining to comment beyond the earnings call and pointing to partnerships with 10 retailers including Walmart, Best Buy and Gap, many of which last reported earnings before Muse launched; Chipotle's loyalty-discount and after-hours failures, its single-digit agentic-order lift and its website-code rework; and Costco and Extra Space Storage seeing growth in sales originating from AI chatbots)Read source
  2. [2] DoorDash Q3 2026 earnings call transcript, as filed with the SEC (exhibit to the October 2026 filing, accession 0001140361-26-041195; read first-hand: CEO Tony Xu — "if you look at where AI agents are today, we're seeing maybe several hundred orders in total from some of these third-party agents")Read source
  3. [3] TechCrunch, "DoorDash said it's only received 'several hundred' orders from AI agents", October 30, 2026 (Xu's wording; the agents named — Muse, Instinct, Fo and others; and DoorDash's 2025-report figure of an average of about 3 million deliveries a day)Read source
  4. [4] DoorDash, "DoorDash Releases Third Quarter 2026 Financial Results", October 29, 2026, via Business Wire (official results, read first-hand: total orders 993 million, Marketplace GOV $33.9 billion, revenue $4.6 billion)Read source
  5. [5] ALFW, "Meta Says 10M+ Have Set Up Muse. Its $200 Shopping Figure Needs Context.", October 21, 2026 (our earlier coverage of Meta's own call: 10M+ set up Muse, about a quarter use it daily, more than a quarter of users shop through it at an average purchase size over $200, travel included; no transaction count, volume or Muse revenue disclosed)Read source