Uber says its customers are still booking rides themselves, not through AI agents. During its busiest week in October, the company recorded only four rides ordered by an AI agent.
The figure came from Uber’s third-quarter earnings call on Wednesday, November 4. Executives shared the data while answering questions from Wall Street analysts. The call followed the release of Uber’s results for the three months ending in September.
The week in question was the week of Halloween. It was the company’s busiest week of the month across rides and food delivery.
Four Rides Out of Millions
Chief financial officer Balaji Krishnamurthy said Uber and Uber Eats handled about 320 million trips and orders that week. Of those, only 500 Uber Eats orders were placed by an AI agent.
Combined with the four rides, that works out to fewer than two agent orders for every million transactions. Food delivery saw more agent use than rides, but the volume was still small.
CEO Dara Khosrowshahi described the results plainly. “It is very, very early and very limited traction that we are seeing so far,” he said.
He added that the company hopes to see more use over time. “Listen, we hope that there will be more traction,” Khosrowshahi said.
Why Speed May Be the Barrier
Khosrowshahi pointed to how fast Uber’s own app already works. The average time to book a ride in the app is about 50 seconds.
Re-ordering a favorite meal on Uber Eats takes about 90 seconds. Those numbers suggest that handing the task to an AI agent may not save customers much time.
Uber is not the only company seeing this pattern. DoorDash said on its earnings call last week that it has received only a few hundred orders from AI agents so far.
Most DoorDash customers are still ordering directly through its app. The two delivery companies are reporting a similar pattern in these early results.
The low numbers come as AI agents draw heavy investment and attention. These tools are designed to complete tasks for users, such as shopping or booking, not just answer questions.
Startup Instinct, founded last year, raised a $1 billion Series C round at a $10 billion valuation. Meta said its Muse app reached the No. 1 spot in Apple’s U.S. App Store last month, topping 10 million users.
Meta said many Muse users were shopping and transacting with businesses. OpenAI, Anthropic, Google and SpaceXAI, which makes Grok, also offer AI agents, along with many smaller startups.
Khosrowshahi said there are around eight major AI assistants on the market today. He expects that number to grow to more than 10 over time.
Despite the slow start, he said Uber sees agents as another way for customers to reach its platform. “We think it will be a net positive in terms of demand on the ecosystem,” he said.
He also said interest from AI developers is strong. “Every single AI system company is talking to us,” Khosrowshahi told analysts.
