The CES 2026 celebration is on a roll, and DoorDash is on the frontline. Here’s the scoop.
The world’s leading food delivery app’s take during the event is sharpening its ads with restaurant-based interest targeting, retailer-level sponsored products – like Amazon’s – and category share insights. For one of the DoorDash executives, Toby Espinosa, the goal is to connect real behavior with measurable growth, with AI in-charge of the heavy lifting.
Espinosa spoke ahead of this year’s CES with this deputy for ads in DoorDash, describing the company’s goals as expanding in what he considered “incremental access points for advertisers.”
That’s the theory. In practice, this means maneuvering closer to real behavior, instead of the broad proxies. DoorDash is doing this by launching interest targeting based on restaurant ordering habits, retailer-level targeting for sponsored items, and new category share insights that reveal brands and how they stack up versus competitors within the platform. The priority is reaching out to people who are actually more likely to make the purchase.
“For all the noise around CES this year, one idea keeps surfacing: technology is no longer something layered on top of life. It is woven directly into how people decide, act, and buy. That matters to DoorDash, whose focus is on tightening the connection between intent and action,” correspondents in food delivery and ridesharing stated.
Will DoorDash be able to drive home the point? Highly likely.
Espinosa is placing the app at around 70 percent of the way to metrics optimized for growth. The rest, he told Ridesharing Forum, stems from “getting the scoreboard right,” so brands could evaluate performance using the similar definitions used internally, instead of “adding more surface-level metrics.”
Careful use of AI should be reiterated. AI can drive change, but it can likewise destroy, so DoorDash is careful not to oversell this innovation.
“It allows us to make connection points on what is relevant and valuable to each of us as a consumer that we otherwise wouldn’t have guessed,” he went on.
Rather than building models around a few assumed correlations, Espinosa argues artificial intelligence could pull from many more signals to improve matching and personalization.
Katie Daleo, the general manager of Consumer Packaged Goods advertisements in DoorDash, told Ridesharing Forum how she interprets Espinosa’s takes, “Retail media is evolving quickly, and advertisers need solutions that deliver meaningful signals and measurable impact.”
CES 2026 is taking place until January 9th in Las Vegas. Stay in the loop by creating that account here on Ridesharing Forum to join the discussions.