On Sundays, I order Mama Ji’s. I get the hot and numbing fish, the combination chow mein and spicy cucumber salad with white rice. I order through DoorDash and schedule delivery for 8pm. Once the driver arrives with the nondescript plastic bag I provide my code and complete the handoff.
My first task is to immediately open the hot and numbing fish so the fried fish doesn’t lose its crispness against the mala, the Sichuan peppercorn and chili sauce. I like to think that I have this ritual down to a science in how I portion each dish in balance with one another after trying just about everything on their menu. The fish is hot and crispy while the mala numbs my mouth, the cucumber salad cools off any excess spice while the chow mein is the perfect pair of comfort food. I’ve enjoyed this weekly cheat meal long enough that I notice when it’s a different chef preparing the food that day.
DoorDash makes this ritual easy for me. I simply open the app and it remembers the dishes that I ordered last week. It offers me rewards based on how much I have spent, discounts if I use particular credit cards and promotional offers like buy 1 get 1 free from the restaurant itself. And it suggests other restaurants I might like, despite my die-hard loyalty to Mama Ji’s.
In a world of AI, DoorDash could do so much more. It could get my context, not just my previous orders last Sunday but absorb my entire life that might impact what I want to eat. For preferences, I can connect reservations I’ve made, groceries I’ve ordered and places I’ve reviewed. For health, I can connect my workout and sleep activity, heart rate and body composition. For routine, I can connect my calendar and location so it would know if I’m traveling or working at the office late. And it could ask me questions about my goals and preferences, such as if I want to lose weight or gain muscle. I can give DoorDash context on what I want to eat, how I want it to impact me and where it needs to be delivered.
With AI, I can also give DoorDash a $1,000 per month budget and have it make all the decisions for me. By giving AI the ability to make choices for us, we are giving it some of our own agency. As we give this agency to agents, the question is if the agent is working for me or DoorDash?
All of the measurements I can provide for context are important ingredients to combine to create the best choice. But it’s the interpretation of these data points against the incentives of the agent that determines if something is good for me or good for DoorDash’s bottom line. If I just give them $1,000 a month and say feed me, their incentive is to send me the cheapest calories they can find that keeps me just happy enough that I don’t churn as a customer. As a result, the agent is working for DoorDash and my preferences compete with their goals of retention, delivery efficiency and margin. If instead the agent makes choices to optimize my overall well being, I effectively have the perfect personal chef. In that scenario, I would be more than willing to hand over my agency (and money) in exchange for the convenience. But that doesn’t seem to be the full price of this convenience.
First, I would be handing over a lot of information about myself that is valuable to a lot of stakeholders well beyond those delivering my next meal. How does my information get rented or sold to third parties? Is there some kind of sovereignty I can have over my data? History has shown we don’t really care about our privacy and how it’s monetized by others. We show initial resistance but then succumb to the tremendous convenience we get in the immediate term. Our human nature will continue to work against us unless we build something truly for ourselves.
We also need to consider the impact our agency has on market forces. Today, when I search for Sichuan on DoorDash here in SF, I get over 50 restaurants to choose from. But once my choice becomes giving a budget to DoorDash, how many Sichuan restaurants do they need to have? I might be getting hot numbing fish from a private-label, Kirkland-like DoorDash product, made in their own ghost kitchen. Even the idea of Kirkland becomes invisible as I’m not choosing from a list of options in the first place. It just shows up in brandless plastic containers like it already does today so I don’t notice the brand. What remains of the restaurants? It seems like giving our agency to DoorDash will consolidate the market so that we will then have fewer choices in the future. In this world, how will all these Sichuan restaurants survive? Are there incentives in agency that can or should be considered to preserve a marketplace of choice even when we remove the need for a marketplace by delegating our agency?
The answer to both our privacy and preservation of the choices we enjoy today is to create our own agents that truly work for us. My data goes to my agent and nowhere else, I own it and no one rents it. Instead of DoorDash getting a thousand dollars, my agent has a budget to buy from every restaurant and grocery store in the city. I can work directly with Mama Ji’s agent, or even the agent of my favorite chef at the restaurant. I no longer need to give my data or my agency to another company. I can enjoy the convenience provided by AI making choices for me with an agent that has my best interest in mind. And the marketplace of options grows from 50 Sichuan restaurants to hundreds of Sichuan chefs who capture more of the value they create.
We are predisposed to convenience. We have proven again and again that we will trade privacy for ease, that we will trade immediacy for future consequence. One of the great capabilities of AI is the elimination of barriers to building something ourselves. It is more convenient than ever to shape our future. Fighting for agency is about accepting our desire to delegate choices while pushing to make those choices work for us. The urgency to act today is that we still have thousands of restaurants to point our agents at. If we don’t and give our agency to a third party, those choices will disappear as platforms consolidate them. History suggests most of us won’t step up in time.
The food will be hot either way. The question is how numb.