By Natalie Lung, Bloomberg

DoorDash Inc. ended a pilot of its voice-ordering product for restaurant clients, a year after it poached talent from an artificial intelligence startup to bolster the product.

DoorDash’s decision was revealed when a customer, the Donatos Pizza chain, said in a statement that it found a new vendor because the food delivery company was “sunsetting” its automated ordering features. A DoorDash spokesperson confirmed Tuesday that the company stopped the pilot at the end of April.

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“We have a high bar for continued investment and remain guided by what customers and data tell us,” the spokesperson said in response to a Bloomberg News inquiry. “We scale or wind down initiatives based on many factors including product-market fit, customer demand, and other factors.”

DoorDash has been expanding beyond its core delivery service to offer more enterprise services designed to help with restaurant operations. Earlier this month, the company announced it’s buying hospitality tech company SevenRooms Inc. for $1.2 billion, a move that would allow it to offer software to global restaurant groups as well as integrate a table-booking feature into the DoorDash app for consumers.

DoorDash launched the voice-ordering product for restaurants in August 2023. At the time, it intended for the AI tool to help restaurants answer calls during peak times so humans could focus on in-store duties. In March last year it hired senior members from startup Standard AI, including its chief executive officer and co-founders, to work on the product.

Most former Standard AI employees are still part of a “broader team working on a number of AI-related experiments” at the company, the DoorDash spokesperson said, adding that  “we have developed proprietary technology and learnings from this pilot, and we’re excited to deploy it through a number of other customer use cases.”

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