# AI-Driven Merchant Tools and Viral Funding Models

**Podcast:** TechCrunch Daily Crunch
**Published:** 2026-05-05

## Transcript

This is TechCrunch.
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Like every successful company these days, DoorDash has added new AI tools.
I'm Imran Sheik and your Tuesday Daily Crunch featuring three big tech headlines starts right now.
Overnight on Saturday, Spirit Airlines shut down, canceling all flights, letting go of 17,000 employees and telling ticket holders to just not come to the airport.
Well, people were flabbergasted but also bereft.
You see, for all its indignities, Spirit was cheap.
But then, one of them had an idea.
Hunter Peterson, a voice actor with frequent flyer grievances, posted a TikTok asking, what if 20% of American adults chipped in the price of a spirit fare and just bought it?
He called it Spirit 2.0, owned by the people.
Well, within hours, he'd thrown up a website, a janky one-hour job by his own admission, and by Sunday, 36,000 founding patrons had pledged nearly $23 million, crashing his servers in the process.
Now, none of it is real money.
You see, these are non-binding pledges.
Also worth noting, the actual cost of acquiring and relaunching an airline runs into the billions.
Peterson knows this.
In a video posted earlier today, he winkingly tried recruiting aviation lawyers, PR people, and lawyers with a one-word ask.
Help?
I know what I don't know, he told his followers, but you're committing to this bit, so I'm committing to this bit.
A new study examines how large language models perform in a variety of medical contexts, including real emergency room cases, where at least one model seemed to be more accurate than human doctors.
You see, the study was published this week in Science and comes from a research team led by physicians and computer scientists at Harvard Medical School and Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center.
The researchers said they conducted a variety of experiments to measure how open AI is modeled compared to human physicians.
Well, in one experiment, researchers focused on 76 patients who came into the Beth Israel emergency room, comparing the diagnoses offered by two internal medicine attending physicians to those generated by OpenAI's O1 and 4O models.
These diagnoses were assessed by two other attending physicians who did not know which ones came from humans and which ones...
came from AI.
In Harvard Medical School's press release about the study, the researchers emphasized that they did not pre-process the data at all.
The AI models were presented with the same information that was available in the electronic medical records at the time of each diagnosis.
With that information, the O1 model managed to offer the exact or very close diagnosis in 67% of triage cases compared to one physician who had the exact or close diagnosis.
55% of the time, and to the other who hit the mark 50% of the time.
Now, to be clear, the study didn't claim that AI is ready to make real life-or-death decisions in the emergency room.
Instead, it said the findings show an urgent need for prospective trials to evaluate these technologies in real-world patient care settings.
On Monday, DoorDash added new AI-powered tools that let merchants speed up onboarding, edit photos to make dishes look better, and create websites based on their app listings.
The onboarding tool works similarly to the one Amazon launched in 2024.
Merchants can point the tool to their website, from which it will automatically fetch information such as photos, store hours, and menu items to create a listing on the app.
Merchants can review and edit all this information before publishing the listing.
DoorDash has also revamped its video library.
The library now lets merchants tag dishes in video so that customers can order those items directly.
The library also shows stats such as total views, video-driven sales, and new customer sales.
Restaurants are getting a few photo editing tools too.
AI Retouch can replace backgrounds, sharpen images, and optimize lighting without changing the dish.
AI Replate manipulates pictures of dishes so they look like they're plated professionally, changing lighting and color.
Merchants can also provide a reference image to apply a particular style to an existing image.
At DoorDash, we're constantly building tools to help merchants succeed from their very first day on the platform to every order after.
These new tools reflect our belief that the right technology should remove friction, not add it, so merchants can focus on what they do best, making great food and delivering incredible food.
customer experiences, Brian Tolkien, head of merchant product at DoorDash, said in a statement.
The company is adding new features to its commerce platform as well, one of which lets restaurant owners spin up a website based on existing DoorDash content, such as menu items and photos.
The company said during a test of the new feature, merchants saw order conversion rates of nearly 10% on average.
The company has also added a new marketing campaign builder that lets merchants automate content creation, email outreach.
And folks, that's your Daily Crunch.
Today's stories were reported by Ivan Mehta, Anthony Ha, Connie Loizos, and more awesome TechCrunch journalists.
We'll see you here tomorrow.
And until then, find us at TechCrunch.com.
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