CES 2026: How DoorDash is turning intent into action with smarter commerce media

Many marketers are questioning whether the metrics they optimized for actually map to growth. For years, digital advertising rewarded signals that were easy to measure but hard to connect to business outcomes. DoorDash is trying to narrow that gap by aligning its measurement with how consumer packaged goods brands and retailers already judge success, including category share and incremental sales. Espinosa puts the platform “65-70% of the way there.” The rest, he says, comes from “getting the scoreboard right” so brands can evaluate performance using the same definitions they use internally, rather than “adding more surface-level metrics.”

Artificial intelligence underpins much of that progress, but Espinosa is careful not to oversell it. “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 says. Instead of building models around a few assumed correlations, he argues AI can pull from many more signals to improve matching and personalization. On the consumer side, that shows up in “carousels that otherwise did not exist before… tailored just to you.” On the advertiser side, it appears in tools like Smart Campaigns, designed for merchants who “have to be experts at 15 to 20 different things.” In testing, Espinosa says Smart Campaigns drove “a 20% incremental sales lift” and “a 30% lift in new customers.”

The release announcement lands in the same territory, positioning the tools as a response to a retail media market that is quickly getting crowded. “Retail media is evolving quickly and advertisers need solutions that deliver meaningful signals and measurable impact,” says Katie Daleo, general manager of CPG ads at DoorDash. She points to what DoorDash sees as its differentiator: “a unique opportunity to reach over 50 million monthly active users globally,” paired with signals based on restaurant behavior, not just retail browsing.

Scale is what makes the promise interesting and also what raises the bar. DoorDash says it works with more than 550,000 merchants, many of them local businesses balancing operations, staffing and growth at the same time. Espinosa argues that AI does not flatten creativity in this context. “They can now become an expert at marketing using our AI tools,” he says, describing Smart Campaigns as a way to offload the mechanics of optimization so merchants can focus on what they are selling and how they want to show up.

Espinosa also takes a broader view of what this shift does inside companies. He calls himself “the biggest bull case for advertising or marketing in the C-suite,” not because marketing suddenly deserves a bigger seat, but because he sees marketing as the function most closely tied to growth. “Growth will play a more important role in every business over the next decade than it did in the previous decade,” he says. That is not a promise of easy wins. It is an argument that the tools are getting better, the consumer environments are getting better and the compounding effect will put more pressure on brands to keep up.

Asked what shift is being underestimated right now, Espinosa points to how much incremental performance improvement is already coming from relatively basic AI applications. “For every single one of us that has launched an AI tool, you’ve seen crazy improvements in yield,” he says, arguing that the impact is already visible before more headline-grabbing infrastructure changes take hold.

CES still matters to DoorDash for a different reason. Espinosa says the most interesting developments are the ones that bring “the physical world and the digital world closer together.” DoorDash started by digitizing paper menus. Now, he argues, the bigger opportunity is the long tail of local commerce that remains hard to surface online. Compared with the inventory inside a supercenter or a distribution hub, “the collective power of every small business on Main Street” includes far more products that are not yet digitized in a way that makes them easy to discover and buy.

Seen this way, DoorDash’s CES perspective is practical rather than predictive. As intelligent systems move from novelty to infrastructure, the advantage will go to companies that can translate data into decisions at the exact moment people choose what to buy. The technology is evolving quickly. The pressure to make it pay off in real-world outcomes has not changed.

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