DoorDash is now paying its couriers to do more than drop off dinner, according to a report from Entrepreneur. Through a feature called DoorDash Tasks, Dashers can accept short assignments that involve photographing store shelves, filming household chores, and recording spoken conversations, all to help train artificial intelligence and robotics models.
For the roughly eight million people who deliver on the platform, the program is a new way to earn between drop-offs. It also raises fresh questions about how much a gig worker’s time, images, and voice are really worth.
What DoorDash Tasks Actually Offers
The assignments fall into a few buckets. Some are business intelligence jobs, such as scanning supermarket shelves to check stock or photographing a restaurant dish for a menu listing. Others ask workers to film everyday activities like loading a dishwasher or folding laundry, and some pay for unscripted conversations in languages such as Spanish.
The pay is posted per task. In examples cited by Entrepreneur, the app offered about $ 16 to scan store shelves and $ 20 for an everyday Spanish conversation. Tasks appear both in a standalone app and inside the main Dasher app in select markets, though the rollout currently excludes California, New York City, Seattle, and Colorado.
Why This Matters For Self-Employed Couriers
Delivery income has been squeezed by slower order growth and rising costs, so any add-on that pays during downtime is worth a look. A courier waiting on an order could pick up a shelf scan nearby and turn dead time into a few extra dollars.
The trade is your data. Photographing a store, filming your home, or recording your voice hands the platform training material it can use or resell, and those clips do not expire the way a delivery does. Independent workers weighing these gigs should treat the payout as compensation for both time and personal data, not just a quick task.
What Self-Employed Couriers Should Do Next
Before accepting, do the math on the effective hourly rate. A 16-dollar shelf scan that takes ten minutes pays well, but one that requires a 20-minute detour and a wait may not beat a normal delivery.
Read what each task collects and where it happens. Keep personal spaces, other people, and identifying details out of frame unless you are comfortable with that footage living in a training set, and track this income because it is taxable self-employment earnings that you will report on Schedule C. For context on how platforms are increasingly leaning on independent workers, see our coverage of AI agents hiring humans on Upwork.
What To Watch Next
Watch whether DoorDash expands Tasks into the markets it currently excludes, since states like California and New York often shape how gig pay and data rules spread. Rival platforms are experimenting with similar data work, so couriers may soon see comparable offers from other apps.
Also watch how much these micro-tasks actually pay over time. Early rates can look generous while a program recruits, then compress once enough workers sign on.
Photo by appshunter.io: Unsplash
