On Thursday, DoorDash launched Tasks, its newest product that formalizes what had been emerging piecemeal across the app for the past year. It operates on two levels, but there are questions that are unanswered, according to some experts.
Tasks
“Today, we’re introducing Tasks… Businesses need to know what’s actually on their shelves or whether the layout at another location has changed since last week. But getting this information at scale in real-time is a challenge. It’s one we’ve spent over a decade solving, from finding the front door at a tricky address to checking whether a favorite local bakery is open on a holiday. Solving these kinds of problems made our platform better for everyone who uses it. It also turned out to be something other businesses needed too,” DoorDash told Ridesharing Forum.
The first level is a set of new task types within the existing Dasher app, such as taking images of restaurant dishes to populate a menu, taking pictures of a hotel entrance so future drivers can find the drop-off point – in other words, helping the community – or scanning supermarket shelves for inventory checks.
The second level is a standalone Tasks app, designed for activities without the delivery component at all, filming household chores, and recording unscripted conversations in another language.
“It’s simple: you can’t deliver to a door you can’t find or get someone milk if you don’t know what’s on the shelf. These are the kinds of real-world problems we’ve been solving for over a decade, and we realized the same capabilities that helped us could help other businesses, too. The goal of Tasks is to help more businesses understand what’s happening on the ground and gather new insights, all while giving Dashers a new way to earn on their own terms. There are more than eight million Dashers who can reach almost anywhere in the U.S. and who want to earn flexibly beyond delivery. That’s a powerful capability to digitize the physical world,” said Ethan Beatty, the general manager of DoorDash Tasks.
For DoorDash, the logic of this fresh feature is pretty straightforward. The app has spent over a decade building the operational infrastructure to dispatch workers to specific physical locations, verify completion, and handle payments at scale. This is precisely the capability that artificial intelligence collection needs, and it isn’t something that can quickly be replicated by companies that do not have a network yet similar to this.
Unanswered questions
This product is super nice, but experts say there are still questions unanswered. For one, the world’s number one food delivery app hasn’t published details on how it handles consent, data retention, or the rights workers hold over footage of themselves in their own residences.
Also, the exclusion of California, New York City, Seattle, and Colorado shows jurisdictions with significantly more stringent gig worker and data privacy regulations than the rest of the USA, and this remains conspicuous.
Moreover, in here, pay is determined upfront on a per-task basis, weighted for effort and complexity. However, no average rates or floor guarantees have been disclosed so far. And, these are never minor details, according to these specialists.
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