This Omni Talk Retail Fast Five segment explores DoorDash's new AI-powered search experience and why conversational commerce may be arriving faster than retailers realize.

Chris Walton and Ben Miller discuss natural language search, AI shopping assistants, customer discovery, and why retailers must rethink how shoppers find products online.

The conversation also examines how platforms like DoorDash, Amazon, Google, and ChatGPT are changing consumer expectations and why conversational search is quickly becoming table stakes for digital commerce.

⏩ Tune in for the full episode here: https://youtu.be/toy5NmyXau4

Doordash has launched an AI based app search feature.

According to ChainStorage, DoorDash is enabling natural language search in its iOS app.

The on demand delivery platform is introducing Ask Doordash, a new artificial intelligence enabled way for customers to search the app in their own words.

Shoppers can tap the ask button in the search bar and tell DoorDash what they want to eat, share a recipe link or cookbook photo, or even describe the reservation they're looking for to get personalized results in seconds.

Ben, how significant is it that Door Dash has launched its own AI based search experience?

Are you looking at this announcement any differently because it's Door Dash?

This is a really significant story to pay attention to because of the theme, the broader theme it speaks to.

That's what makes it so important.

It's a theme that I'll go further.

If you look after e commerce at a retailer or consumer brand, this is the most significant thing you should be paying attention to right now.

And that is how customers are searching for your brand and searching your site and how you are being discovered by query engines.

Because that's what it's all about.

A really smart global digital commerce leader told me recently that winning in e commerce is a game of mastering changing algorithms.

And all the data that I'm seeing right now is that users are rapidly adopting kind of these conversational natural language approaches to search which is changing all of our known algorithms.

So there's two big implications of that.

One is how your product gets shown in the results.

So that's AO and geo.

But secondly, the if you acknowledge that you must enable your users to have the ability to ask longer context based questions on your site, for me this is becoming table stakes.

And genuinely, I mean that, I mean that table stakes for retailers.

So you know, with Google's AI overviews, with Gemini, you know, Amazon rolling out Alexa for shopping, which is on his way to becoming the primary way that shoppers are navigating Amazon or just good old chat GPT, they're the switch to context based questions is happening really, really, really quickly.

So if retailers and platforms like DoorDash and DoorDash such a significant platform for people to find, discover and buy products through, if they don't keep up on their owned properties, they're going to lose out really quickly.

Really quickly.

So I think the move from interesting test and learn to table stakes is happening so quickly and I think we just see more and more and more announcements like this.

Yeah, it's interesting too because Kroger and Wegmans, I think actually sent this off to a third party to do for their website too, which I think is an interesting little coinky dink here in terms of how people are handling this.

I talked about that with Shelley Huff.

Like, is this something so core to the user experience, which it sounds like you're probably in that campben that it's probably not, not something you would outsource to a third party, is that right?

No, I, I, I'm all in.

I think this is, this is how people will search your website.

Yeah.

If you're not ready for that, they'll go on to other tools and third party tools instead.

Right.

And you got to figure out how to make it work for you in the long term.

The adoption curve is federation.

Yeah.

No, it's not.

Yeah.

Look, let's go back a couple of years or even longer.

When the idea of voice search was being discussed.

The big proponents of voice search were always saying that it's the natural way to communicate.

And what Google has done is it's forced us to take a natural way to communicate and squeeze it down into three words to go into a search bar.

So look, okay, talking to a machine did not get the traction that some people who were investing in it thought it was going to.

But that idea that we would rather express a concept using more words than have to have an idea and then translate it into what a Google prompt might be, Google has said to us, you don't need to do that anymore.

So if you're not getting your website ready to not have to do it anymore, you're going to miss out.

Yeah, so, so 100% agree with that.

I think there's another layer to this story, even More so with DoorDash in particular.

Ben, I'm curious what you think about it.

Like, so I agree with you.

I think this is a very significant announcement.

I think it's very significant partly because DoorDash is the one making it.

Because DoorDash, as we've talked about many times on this show, it's my most used retail app.

I use it for retail consumer experiences more than any other app out there, more than Amazon, more than Walmart.

And the reason for that is it's kind of the Swiss army knife of retail right now.

So Genai, to me, if I'm drawing an analogy, as you drew the X Files analogy, Gen AI search to me is like whoever added the corkscrew for the first time to my Swiss army knife.

It was cool.

It was cool before with just the knives, the toothpicks, even the tweezers, but now I've got the corkscrew, right?

And so that opens up a whole new realm of experiences for me when I think about this inside of the Swiss army knife that is DoorDash already.

Because let's not forget Ben Jordache is already a marketplace.

So it's doing this in a marketplace versus doing it on a branded site.

So it's more akin to Amazon, but its marketplace has different dynamics than Amazon's because you can also order food for it or order other services as well.

So who's to say, like if I just get crazy here, start thinking long term, who's to say you can't start comparison shopping in that marketplace more easily than you could now as you're envisioning it, who's to say you couldn't start making restaurant orders based on budget comparisons?

Like saying, hey, I only want to spend $50 on my dinner tonight for my family of four.

What are my best options?

If that is enabled in this or it gets better over time, that is going to spur more and more usage, which as we know more and more usage has so many one plus one equals three benefits to the platform itself.

So that's what I think is really fascinating here is DoorDash has been quietly building a very formidable app that can hold its own in a lot of ways.