Almost no one uses AI agents to book their Uber, company says

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.

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 chief financial officer, Balaji Krishnamurthy, told Wall Street analysts on the call that the company handled around 320 million trips and orders across Uber and Uber Eats during the week of Halloween, but only 500 Uber Eats orders were placed by an AI agent.

"It is very, very early and very limited traction that we are seeing so far," said CEO Dara Khosrowshahi, referring to the low number of orders placed by AI agents. "Listen, we hope that there will be more traction."

The surprisingly low numbers of AI-initiated transactions come amid growing hype for a new wave of AI agents that don't just answer questions but also handle tasks on users' behalf. There's been an explosion of personal AI startups, including one of the buzziest, Instinct, which was founded last year and raised its most recent round of funding at a $10 billion valuation. Meta's Muse also became the No. 1 app in Apple's U.S. App Store last month, topping 10 million users, per Meta's own reporting. The company said many were using it to shop and transact with businesses.

OpenAI, Anthropic, Google, and SpaceXAI (Grok) are also now offering their own AI agents, as are numerous smaller startups.

Still, early numbers from public companies indicate the agentic web still has a long way to go. DoorDash, for instance, said last week on its earnings call that it has only received a few hundred orders from AI agents so far, as most customers are still placing orders through the DoorDash app.

Uber is seeing the same behavior, it seems. Khosrowshahi pointed out that the average time to book a ride is only 50 seconds in the company's app, and re-ordering a favorite food only takes 90 seconds. That suggests an AI agent isn't necessarily saving anyone time.

Despite the low number of AI-driven transactions, Khosrowshahi seemed bullish on the idea of agents in general. "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.

Right now, there are around eight major AI assistants on the market, Khosrowshahi noted, and he expects that number to grow to more than 10 in time.

"Every single AI system company is talking to us," he added.