My friend Sarah Perez reported for TechCrunch this week “very few” people use AI agents to book rides with Uber.
“Very few people are using personal AI agents to order Ubers, apparently. On the transportation giant’s third-quarter earnings call on Wednesday, the company said that only four rides were ordered through an AI agent during its busiest week in October: the week of Halloween,” Perez wrote on Wednesday. “While more people used an AI agent to order food through its delivery service, Uber Eats, the volume was still fairly small compared to the overall number of trips.”
Uber’s CFO, Balaji Krishnamurthy, told analysts the company handled 320 million trips and orders across Uber and UberEats, but only 500 of those UberEats orders were placed by an AI agent. As a percentage, that’s 0.00015625%. Similarly, DoorDash said on its own recent earnings call it received only “several hundred” orders made by AI.
“It is very, very early and very limited traction that we are seeing so far,” said Dara Khosrowshahi, Uber’s CEO, about the infinitesimal agent numbers. “Listen, we hope that there will be more traction.”
It’s sensible that companies like Uber (and DoorDash) would use time as a barometer for success here. Instead of a human manually navigating the app to book a ride and/or food order, which obviously takes a few minutes, an AI agent doing so on one’s behalf is seen as a timesaver—in other words, a form of convenience. As usual, though, what’s missed in this calculus is accessibility! To wit, suppose you’re a person with disabilities with cognitive, visual, and/or fine-motor conditions—or some combination thereof—who finds booking Uber rides or ordering on UberEats tedious and overwhelming. There’s surely a lot of tapping and visual scanning and cognitive load to ensure, say, you’re going where you need to go or you’re getting the food you want to eat. It’s pressure! Ergo, having an AI agent do all the grunt work for you, assuming you’re comfortable with the idea, can very plausibly make the whole experience more accessible because said barriers are removed. This isn’t trivial. It’s understandable that the general public may be apathetic or lukewarm at using tools like Meta’s Muse or OpenAI’s Dots, which says a lot writ large, but nascent popularity doesn’t detract from the bonafide accessibility gains of emergent technology like AI. More hay should be made over this ideal, but as with features like Siri Recap and Live Rewind on Apple Watch, privacy outcries suck all the oxygen from any other conversations. Of course people with disabilities have a right to privacy, and we expect it, but we want independence too. Using an AI agent to get places or get nourished isn’t abdication or laziness; it’s asserting our own agency to get things we need. AI agents are tools, after all, and accessibility matters as much as convenience.
