Uber: AI agents booked just 4 rides in its busiest week

Uber’s third-quarter earnings call Wednesday delivered an unusually specific data point on the AI-agent hype cycle: only four rides were booked through an AI agent during the company’s busiest week of October, the week of Halloween, chief financial officer Balaji Krishnamurthy told analysts. Agent-placed orders on Uber Eats were a bit higher but still tiny — 500, out of around 320 million total trips and orders Uber and Uber Eats handled that week combined.

CEO Dara Khosrowshahi called the numbers “very, very early and very limited traction,” while adding he expects adoption to grow. The soft start comes despite a wave of hype around personal AI agents meant to handle tasks, not just answer questions — a category that includes buzzy startup Instinct, founded last year and recently valued at $10 billion, and Meta’s Muse, which climbed to the top of Apple’s U.S. App Store ranking last month and has surpassed 10 million users, many of them shopping or transacting with businesses, per Meta. OpenAI, Anthropic, Google and SpaceXAI’s Grok have all rolled out their own agents too.

Uber isn’t alone: DoorDash said last week it has logged only a few hundred AI-agent orders so far, with most customers still ordering directly through its app. Khosrowshahi suggested one reason — booking a ride in Uber’s own app takes only 50 seconds, and reordering a favorite meal takes only 90, leaving little time for an agent to actually save. Still, he said he sees agents as a net-positive source of demand for Uber’s platform overall, and noted the market currently has around eight major AI assistants, a figure he expects to climb past 10 over time.

Why it matters

That a transportation giant handling hundreds of millions of weekly transactions is seeing only a handful of AI-initiated bookings suggests the “agentic web” remains more hype than actual consumer behavior, for now.