Almost no one uses AI agents to book their Uber, company says
- ID
- 43138
- Status
- summarized
- Published
- 05 Nov 2026, 5:56 AM
- Fetched
- 05 Nov 2026, 7:23 AM
- Provider
- TechCrunch
- Category
- technology
- Original URL
- https://techcrunch.com/2026/11/04/almost-no-one-uses-ai-agents-to-book-their-uber-company-says/
- Source URL
- https://techcrunch.com/feed/
Summary
- Score
- 7.5
- Created
- 05 Nov 2026, 7:23 AM
- Tags
- Audience
- ai_agent_userssaas_foundersdevelopersai_ml_learners
What happened
On Uber's Q3 earnings call, CFO Balaji Krishnamurthy said that during the week of Halloween — a stretch with roughly 320 million trips and orders across Uber and Uber Eats — only four rides were booked through an AI agent and just 500 Uber Eats orders came from agents. CEO Dara Khosrowshahi called it "very, very early and very limited traction," while DoorDash said on its own call last week that it has seen only a few hundred agent-placed orders. The numbers land against heavy agent hype: Instinct reportedly raised at a $10 billion valuation, and Meta's Muse topped the U.S. App Store with over 10 million users.
Why it matters
Treat agent-initiated transactions as a research line, not a growth channel, for now: 4 rides and 500 food orders out of ~320 million weekly transactions is roughly a rounding error, so don't staff an integration team or pitch "agentic commerce distribution" to investors without acknowledging this counter-datapoint. If you're building an agent that books or buys things, the bottleneck is evidently consumer trust and habit, not API availability — so instrument for the moment that flips, and keep the integration cheap until then.
Discussion angle
What single metric would convince you agent-driven bookings are real — and if it stays at 4 rides a week for another year, which agent-integration work in your roadmap gets cut?