Uber said personal AI agents accounted for a vanishingly small share of transactions during its busiest week of the year. On the company’s third-quarter earnings call, CFO Balaji Krishnamurthy told analysts that only four Uber rides were booked through an AI agent during the week of Halloween.
Activity levels and raw figures
Across Uber and Uber Eats, the company handled roughly 320 million trips and orders during that week, Krishnamurthy said. Of those, about 500 Uber Eats orders were placed via an AI agent. Executives described the volumes as tiny relative to overall demand.
Company comments and industry context
CEO Dara Khosrowshahi characterized the traction as limited: “It is very, very early and very limited traction that we are seeing so far,” and added, “Listen, we hope that there will be more traction.” He also noted operational timings in the app — an average ride booking takes about 50 seconds and re-ordering a favorite meal about 90 seconds — suggesting an AI agent may not yet offer a clear time advantage for many users.
Khosrowshahi discussed wider market interest, saying the company sees roughly eight major AI assistants now and expects that number to exceed 10. “We think that is another opportunity to reach our platform. We think it will be a net positive in terms of demand on the ecosystem,” he said. “Every single AI system company is talking to us.”
Public-company early data from other services show similar patterns. DoorDash reported only a few hundred orders from AI agents so far, and Uber’s figures align with that limited adoption.
The earnings call came amid a broader surge of AI agent offerings from firms including OpenAI, Anthropic, Google and SpaceXAI (Grok), and a wave of startups such as Instinct, which raised funding at a reported $10 billion valuation. Meta’s Muse also reached more than 10 million users, according to Meta, with some users engaging it for shopping and transactions.
The company provided the cited trip and order totals, the AI-driven order counts, the quoted executive comments, and the app timing figures during its third-quarter earnings call in early November.
Original source: TechCrunch AI