Dara Khosrowshahi on replacing Uber drivers — and himself — with AI

It’s become an annual tradition to have Uber CEO Dara Khosrowshahi join us in the studio when he comes to New York for Uber’s big Go-Get event every year. This year, the big news was that Uber's expanding into a much larger platform for travel, starting with hotel booking and services like personal shopping. Uber is going so far as to call this an everything app, so I wanted to see how far Dara thinks everything actually goes — and whether he’s feeling pressure to own more of the user experience in a world where AI companies keep promising that their chatbots will book all the cars for you. Links: Uber adds hotels to its app in big travel swing | The Verge Uber CEO Dara Khosrowshahi is okay with reinventing the bus | Decoder I have to be honest, AI will replace jobs at Uber | Diary of a CEO The DoorDash problem | Decoder Airbnb CEO Brian Chesky wants to build the everything app | Decoder Booking and Priceline chief wants you to yell at bots, not humans | Decoder Subscribe to The Verge to access the ad-free version of Decoder! Credits: Decoder is a production of The Verge and part of the Vox Media Podcast Network. Decoder is produced by Kate Cox and Nick Statt; this episode was edited by Xander Adams. Our editorial director is Kevin McShane. The Decoder music is by Breakmaster Cylinder. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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  Hello and welcome to Decoder. I'm Neelai Patel, editor in chief of The Verge, and Decoder is my show about big ideas and other problems. Today, I'm talking with Uber CEO Dara Khosrowshahi. It's become something of an annual tradition to have Dara join us in the studio when he comes to New York for Uber's big Go Get event every year, and it's always a lot of fun. The big news this year is that Dara is really starting to think about Uber as a much larger platform for travel, starting with the ability to book hotels in the Uber app, thanks to a partnership with Expedia. There's also new services, like being able to have coffee and snacks waiting near Uber when it arrives, and even personal shopping. Uber is going so far as to call itself an everything app now, so I wanted to see how far Dara thinks everything actually goes, and whether he's feeling pressure to own

• 2:42Speaker 05

  more of the user experience in a world where AI companies keep promising that their chatbots will book all the cars and hotels for you. I also wanted to know if these chatbots have created any opportunities for Uber. Last year, Dara told me he was wide open to partnerships with AI companies, just to see if they were meaningful. But all the AI Uber integrations I've seen so far have been pretty clunky and far slower than just using the app myself. So we dug into what Dara is seeing there, and if he sees any potential in the future. I've also been dying to talk to software CEOs about what AI is doing inside their companies, as AI coding tools and agentic systems upend software development. Just a couple weeks ago, Uber's CTO said the company had already burned through its entire token budget for the year by the start of April, and Dara told me he was starting to rethink how fast

• 3:27Speaker 05

  the company would hire people as it spent more money on tokens. That's a big bet, and I wanted to know if Dara was also rethinking how his software teams are structured as AI starts to muddle the relationship between product managers, designers, and engineers. Lastly, we talked about Uber's increasingly large investments in autonomous cars, especially its big investment in Rivian, and what kinds of milestones Dara is looking for as the technology evolves. I also wanted to know what happens to all of Uber's drivers in a future where robots are doing all that work. Of course, that means I also asked Dara when he thinks AI will be ready to replace him as CEO. It turns out, there's already a rogue AI Dara operating inside of Uber. There's a lot going on in this one. Dara was as clear and candid as ever, and I think you're gonna like it. Okay, Uber CEO Dara Khosrowshahi. Here we go.

• 4:25Speaker 05

  Darko Sari, the CEO of Uber. Welcome back to Decoder.

• 4:27Speaker 06

  Thank you very much. Good to be back.

• 4:29Speaker 05

  I'm happy to have you. It's like a yearly tradition. You guys do your go get event. You have a bunch of news and then you come down to where we are.

• 4:35Speaker 06

  Chock full of news for you.

• 4:36Speaker 05

  Yeah.

• 4:37Speaker 06

  Chock full of news.

• 4:37Speaker 05

  And we hang out together in person, which is my very favorite thing. So thank you for doing it. There's a lot of news to talk about. As I was telling you just before we started, I'm very curious what it means to run a software company.

• 4:48Speaker 06

  Yeah.

• 4:48Speaker 05

  2026 in the age of AI coding agents. And I'm very curious if you're going to have 6,000 people report directly to you, as Jack Dorsey has said. So I want to ask about all that. I want to talk about the news, which you can now book hotels and other experiences in the Uber app, which is a big deal. But I always ask everybody the same two Decoder questions about how companies are structured and decision making. And I just want to do them as a little lightning round at the top.

• 5:13Speaker 06

  Sure.

• 5:13Speaker 05

  So last year on Decoder, I said, how do you make decisions? And you gave me the Amazon answer. You said one way doors and two way doors. A lot of pressure on decision making.

• 5:23Speaker 06

  Totally.

• 5:23Speaker 05

  Lately, we're making big decisions, even expanding the app is a big decision. Has your fundamental framework changed?

• 5:29Speaker 06

  Fundamental framework has not changed. Now, I will tell you that I am pushing the company in something that we talk about, taking smart risks. The pattern that I keep seeing is that as companies get larger, they become more hesitant in terms of risk taking. You know, it's more about playing it safe. It's your public company. You have to hit your quarterly numbers, et cetera. And to some extent, as companies get larger, they get more resilient. They can actually make bigger mistakes. And, you know, for us, we've got almost $10 billion in cash flow. And, you know, when I first joined, if we made a billion dollar mistake, it would be a disaster, right?

• 6:07Speaker 06

  It would put the company on its knees. And I'm not saying that I want to make a billion dollar mistake, but the risks that we have to take. In order to get the right return, in order to keep innovating in the world, you know, for example, with AV, which I'm sure we'll talk about, are getting bigger and we have to be willing to take those risks. And the patterning that I've seen with a lot of companies is that as they get bigger, they get more conservative, the way they operate gets more sandstone. You have more management layers, et cetera. And we very much want to avoid that. And it's taking me really pushing kind of one way door, two way doors as one framework of looking at at decisions, but then smart risk taking as well. We've got to keep taking smart risks as a company.

• 6:52Speaker 06

  It means once in a while, taking risks that in hindsight look dumb. But we've got to push the envelope, especially during this time when there's so much innovation going on.

• 7:01Speaker 05

  Risks, everyone wants to talk about it, but taking the blame for when things fail is like the other part of risk. It's the other side of the coin. Also getting empowering people to take the risk without that fear of failure. Really important. How do you think about the the stakes? Like, how big of a risk is an individual software engineer?

• 7:19Speaker 06

  So I think as long as you can identify the downside of a risk. If you can't identify the downside, don't take the risk. Right? But if you can identify the downside, whether it's time that you're spending on a feature, whether it's compute that you're dedicating to a feature, or you've got to invest a certain amount of capital in building something or going after expanding a new line of business in a country. We're launching Uber Eats in seven countries in Europe as well. As long as you can identify the downside, then you can make the right calculus in terms of whether you should take the risk or not. We absolutely, you know, we want to learn from our mistakes. Like, we don't, there's some people talk about celebrating mistakes. Like, I'm not going to celebrate a mistake. Right?

• 8:04Speaker 06

  But I do want to be able to make sure that I learn from a mistake so that the next decision I make can be incrementally better. That's usually the construct that we use. I think sometimes we over examine our mistakes. And, you know, we, we have meetings, we talk about it. We, we document the issues, what we did wrong, what could have gone better. I'm honestly not a big fan of that. It's a big engineering thing, et cetera, is, hey, understand.

• 8:31Speaker 06

  Why you made a mistake, what you could have done better and then move on with life. Like, let's go build the next thing.

• 8:37Speaker 05

  Put this in a practice for me. What's a risk that came outside of your sphere of management control that worked out? And what's one that didn't?

• 8:45Speaker 06

  So, one that absolutely worked out, for example, I was involved with, but it was the team that really pushed for it, was women riders and drivers preferred. There was some question as to the liquidity in a marketplace. Anytime, you know, one of the big things about Uber is, you know, push a button, you get a car in four to five minutes. There was a question as to whether or not we would have enough women drivers to introduce this feature for women riders. Because if you introduce a feature, it's not like women riders, women drivers preferred, and maybe you'll get one if you're lucky. That's not a good feature, right? So, there was a real question as to the reliability of the marketplace to the extent that you,

• 9:27Speaker 06

  the vast majority of our drivers are men in the US, for example. But because of our size and scale, we have been able to build liquidity in terms of women drivers. And now that women drivers can request women riders, we're looking to increase the number of women drivers as well. So you get kind of this great flywheel. So that's a risk that worked. You know, we have built a taxi product twice. We tried it actually early on and we tried to build taxi the same way that we build peer-to-peer ride share, which is kind of a one-on-one hail to you. And it failed, didn't work. Taxis didn't trust us, they didn't sign up.

• 10:10Speaker 06

  About six years later, Sachin Consul, who's now our CPO, he used to build kind of a taxi app. He said, let's try this again. And so while it failed the first time, this time we approached it differently. And for example, with taxis, because we don't have the data inside of the taxi as to whether or not they are, they have a rider in the car or not. What we did was a little bit different, which is we introduced Blast Dispatch. So when you ask for an Uber and we want to hail a taxi, we will dispatch to 10 different taxis. And whoever says yes first accepts that ride.

• 10:48Speaker 06

  So we're able to get the higher reliability and kind of adjust the way that we've built the product for taxis. Taxis is now our fast, one of our fastest growing products. So that's an example also of like, you make a mistake once, but then actually sometimes you have to try things again, even though it didn't work for the first time with a different flavor, with a different approach. And I'm really glad that we took that shot on taxi.

• 11:13Speaker 05

  We're going to come back to risk because you have a bunch of new products that seem risky.

• 11:16Speaker 06

  Yeah.

• 11:16Speaker 05

  I want to ask you the other decoder question about structure. Last time you were here, I felt like I could have talked to you about the structure of Uber for the entire conversation. You had a wild answer, it was very lengthy. I encourage people to go back to listen to that part of the conversation. But the short version is you said, quote, "We have a combination matrix and line of business structure. You have global leads from mobility and delivery, then everything else is matrixed. And importantly, the thing that you had changed was you had made product a central function. You didn't have separate product teams for eats and in the ride business. Obviously, I'm guessing something has changed here because you have many new lines of business. You have an autonomy division. Quickly describe how Uber's structure has changed.

• 11:56Speaker 06

  The only change in structure, because I do value stability, is that I now have a president and COO, Andrew McDonald. And that was about, Andrew ran our mobility global business. What we observed is that the platform, that is mobility and delivery coming together, and particularly users who use both mobility and delivery, has been growing much, much faster than the individual use cases of mobility and delivery. And it was always my hypothesis, one of the visions that I had coming to Uber, was that once we have the delivery business post-COVID grow so quickly and show that it has the potential of being just as big as a mobility business,

• 12:39Speaker 06

  I had a hypothesis, which is, you know, we compete against mobility players and we compete against delivery pure play players. You could have a hypothesis, which is... Actually being a pure play could be an advantage, right? It's it's all Lyft. The only thing Lyft cares about, at least historically, was US rideshare. They're starting to expand internationally as well. Good for them. About time, you could argue. And the only thing DoorDash cares about, let's say, is food delivery. We're trying to do both, right? And it's hard as a company to do multiple things. It wants to have skill sets and multiple business lines. And so to make up for that, we had mobility team, delivery team.

• 13:21Speaker 06

  We had a bunch of common structures and and services platform. So the where it came together was the was a technology platform. We started really pushing this idea of consumer side platform, driver side platform. To the extent we could get consumers to use both rides and eeps. We had a hypothesis that we would retain them for longer. Turns out not only is the retention better, but they spend much more. Multi-platform consumers spend three times single line consumers as well. We launched the Uber One membership, now almost to 50 million members, growing really, really quickly. They spend three times more and they tend to be multi-platform versus single platform as well. And that we thought could be our secret sauce.

• 14:06Speaker 06

  That could differentiate us from the model line players and allow us to acquire more customers, bring them into the platform, get them to use more stuff, have better retention, et cetera. It sounded great, but the P and L often gone away, right? It's every pixel. It sounds easy. Well, let's use our mobility. Let's cross promote delivery as well. Sounds easy, but that delivery pixel on the mobility app could be taking away from your mobility experience as well. And also could be costing mobility. It's P and L. You know, I'm sending a customer over to do something else. So sometimes the P and L gone away.

• 14:45Speaker 06

  And, you know, I do a lot of stuff and I was pushing platform kind of on the side here. In addition to everything else I do, I really wanted one member of our management team. And Andrew McDonald's been here, you know.

• 15:03Speaker 06

  He's one of the longest tenured employees and most capable team members that we have. I said, Andrew, it's time for you to move from running global mobility to actually become president and CEO of the company and think about the platform as a whole. It's been a big success and it frees me up to work more directly with the product and tech teams. So it's kind of a double benefit for me, but the platform is really starting to sing. We've the number of consumers using both rides and eats has six X in the past five years. And it's growing 50% faster than our general audience. So it's definitely, definitely working. I don't want to lean into it.

• 15:43Speaker 05

  Yeah, it strikes me as just as you're talking here that you're you're describing everything in terms of trade offs, even risk. You're describing in terms of trade offs.

• 15:49Speaker 06

  Everything's a trade off in life. Yeah.

• 15:51Speaker 05

  We might use this compute instead of doing this other thing. And the putting a pixel on this screen might take a customer away from this line of business. And so you've installed the COO just to manage that trade off more holistically.

• 16:03Speaker 06

  Yeah, he negotiates the trade offs on the ground. He's ultimately responsible for one number, if you want to call that, whether it's a customer happiness or that it's a P and L. And obviously often you have to manage for all of above.

• 16:18Speaker 05

  I, you know, my joke on the show constantly is if you tell me your org chart, I can tell you 80% of your problems. You know, it's like they're all the companies are kind of the same and I can get to about 80% of the tension. If you just tell me where all the executives are lined up and who controls what budget. Like Kevin Scott at Microsoft as the CTO once was the person in charge of distributing the GPUs. And I was like, that's all I need to know. Like I, I know almost everything about Microsoft at this moment in time. Now it seems much more complicated for a variety of reasons, but at that moment I could just tell. It sounds like, and obviously the secret is in the last 20%. It sounds like you've installed an executive just to oversee the 20% of the prioritization and the trade offs.

• 16:55Speaker 06

  It's the 20% of the prioritization of the trade offs, but you could argue it's our most important 20%. It's a 20% that no one else has. And in one year, the 20% doesn't really matter. But when you compounded over five years, over 10 years, you get the results that we've gone, which is generally we've grown faster than our competitors. And we're able to be more profitable than our competitors. That's the power of the platform. And I really wanted to lead in at some point, it was getting up to a scale where it wasn't a part time job. I needed someone really focused on the whole thing.

• 17:26Speaker 05

  So the news here in that context feels like, oh, we're going to bet on the platform more.

• 17:30Speaker 06

  We have bet on platform for the past five years. It's a vision that we've always had. It's working. And when something works, you want to double down.

• 17:39Speaker 05

  Okay, I'm going to be very reductive here. The last time you were here, I described Uber as a magic button that made a Toyota Highlander appear in my life.

• 17:46Speaker 06

  Yep.

• 17:47Speaker 05

  Wherever I am in the world, almost statistically like

• 17:50Speaker 06

  Something like a Toyota Highlander will show up.

• 17:52Speaker 05

  Yeah, Toyota Highlander is going to arrive. That's great. And then it's going to move me around. And the jump from there to the Toyota Highlander has food in it is reasonably small. To it's a courier service is reasonably small. We're moving things around. We're a logistics business.

• 18:06Speaker 06

  Yeah.

• 18:06Speaker 05

  The news here is you're doing hotel booking in partnership with Expedia. You've got shopping assistance. Now that cars might have coffee in them.

• 18:14Speaker 06

  We got a lot going on.

• 18:14Speaker 05

  This is far beyond logistics for a platform that was pretty much organized around logistics. Tell me about that in the context of risk and trade offs and platform bet.

• 18:24Speaker 06

  Yeah, absolutely. So first I would say, and these are different kinds of bets that we're making. And by the way, not all of them are going to succeed. And if they do, we're being too conservative. I expect some of this stuff not to work. Hopefully, most of it will. One that I'm quite confident that's going to work is actually travel and hotel bookings in that Uber is already is very highly used by the global traveler, right? We operate in more than 70 countries. Often, what's the first thing that you do? When you arrive in an airport in a city other than a home city, you open the Uber app. And part of what we announced is usually that Uber app is kind of the same app,

• 19:04Speaker 06

  regardless of the context that you have. If you think about it, when you open Uber at home, and we know, you know, you're in your home city, that should be a different experience if you've just landed in Paris and you open Uber, right? It's like it. That's a different context. So for example, we have what's called travel mode. You open up the app and we first give you step by step instructions as to how to get to an Uber and how, you know, how long is a walk going to take? How long is the pickup? What are typical rides? We make it context aware, so to speak, and we give you highlights on what's going on in Paris. Lots of good stuff. Now, the sheer numbers that we've got, which is we have over a hundred million of our riders now

• 19:50Speaker 06

  are taking rides to and from airports every single year. Hundred million. That's a huge audience. We do 1.5 billion trips a year outside of your home city. So we have the perfect audience and Uber is built for travel in terms of our being present all over the place. So it's a perfect audience to start to build out the travel offerings. We started experimenting actually with train in the UK and it's worked out really well. It drives frequency, which is pretty cool. And now we announced a deal with Expedia where now we offer hotel bookings through Uber. It's smooth. We have all your information. We've got your context.

• 20:33Speaker 06

  And what's really cool is for Uber One members, they get 10% off every single Uber, every single hotel booking. You get credits back to use and then you get 20% off a rolling list of 10,000 hotels. So we're making it really worth your while to book hotels on Uber.

• 20:49Speaker 05

  Tell me about the insight that led to that risk because I think about Uber and I'm either, I just need to get somewhere or something. Open the app and the time sense of Uber is like right now. I need something right now. Or I'm going to the airport tomorrow and I live in a reasonably remote area and I need to make sure the car is going to arrive. So I'm going to pick tomorrow is about as far out as I go. I never land in an airport and think, I need a hotel. Like that's a

• 21:13Speaker 06

  Yes, yes.

• 21:14Speaker 05

  Something that has happened.

• 21:15Speaker 06

  Yeah.

• 21:16Speaker 05

  If that is the occurrence, a hotel feels like the time horizon of needing hotels is much longer than anything Uber has previously offered. At least in my experience.

• 21:25Speaker 06

  Yeah, yeah.

• 21:25Speaker 05

  So that's a bet. You gotta get people to think about Uber months or weeks before they need it. What's the insight that said we can get people to do that?

• 21:33Speaker 06

  So it's a bet and you just described actually an adjustment to your behavior, which is Uber has always been about on demand, right? And one of the questions that we had is can we move from on demand transportation to transportation by appointment, for example? So the first step that we took was actually Uber Reserve, probably three, four years ago. And if you remember, we used to have an old Reserve product where you would reserve an Uber, but we would be hacking it in the backend. You wouldn't actually reserve an Uber. We would then call the Uber on demand when we thought that it could get to you by that reservation time.

• 22:15Speaker 06

  It was okay, but it didn't get you the reliability that you needed. It wasn't a guaranteed reservation, so to speak. So we took the signal, which is some people were trying the product, but it wasn't that good, to be honest. We said, listen, what if we really up the reliability game? And we sent the dispatch to drivers in advance. We did some research. Drivers are like, hey, I like knowing what my next day is going to be like. So it was good for drivers. We were able to charge a premium, give it to the driver, essentially to up reliability. And we started building the habit of this is an on demand service to actually, this is more than an on demand service. And I'm going to think about scheduling things in my life,

• 23:01Speaker 06

  often having to do with travel. Now, what we're finding is actually some people are hacking Reserve, if you want to call it that, for reliability. So if you're in West Jessica County in Armonk and the liquidity for Uber is lower, you may not want to use on demand for your commute, but you can use Reserve for your commute as well. So what started as let's try this for travel is now being used to hack reliability to some extent. That insight of Reserve building, and we've been at it for four to five years. You know, reliability is not perfect, perfect, but it's 99% now. And we're always kind of. Working that trade off between reliability and price because we want the price premium to be

• 23:45Speaker 06

  as low as possible, but you can't lose too much reliability. That insight led us to believing that you actually can move from on demand to scheduled. And the offerings, the Uber one kind of discounts, we think will hopefully over a period of time, change behavior. So you actually come to Uber to reserve your booking in advance. We don't think this is going to be a last minute thing. Like if you get to a city and you don't have a hotel, I mean, there is something wrong. Maybe it'll be there on a cancellation basis, but we are trying to drive reservation behavior and we've demonstrated previously that we can.

• 24:24Speaker 05

  Yeah, I feel like hardcore travelers who know to reserve an Uber, who are some of your best customers, they like price shopping hotels.

• 24:34Speaker 06

  Yes.

• 24:34Speaker 05

  And there's a lot of credit card points and my sister's a credit card points person.

• 24:38Speaker 06

  Yes.

• 24:39Speaker 05

  It's frankly a little terrifying, but she's really good at it. How are you going to compete with that? Because that is the, that's the customer. In my mind, the customer who knows to book a hotel on Uber is also the person with five different credit cards, trying to get the best deal. And they know that this portal is where they need to go at this time. How do you compete with that?

• 24:56Speaker 06

  So I actually, I had an earlier interview with the points guy and I asked him, what's the best credit card for travel? Because I was curious. Turns out Amex Platinum, according to the points guy, is the best credit card for travel.

• 25:10Speaker 05

  I don't believe you because this worked out too well.

• 25:13Speaker 06

  I'm just, I'm just saying, it was amazing. And we have a great relationship with Amex, where you get benefits and free bookings on Ubers as well. So it's actually, there's a lot of layering that we're doing. If you've got Delta SkyMiles, you can get Delta SkyMiles for booking on Uber. We have a relationship with Marriott Bonvoy. We've got travelers using Uber all the time. We've got the Amex Platinum card, the best card for travelers as well. So I think we have kind of the right elements coming together to get some percentage of our Uber. To one of the members to try the booking experience and then we'll go from there. And, and, and I do think that this would be a failure if it ends with hotel booking.

• 25:59Speaker 06

  You know, one of the pieces of magic that Uber brings is it's actually the backend experience. You know, one of my learnings, when I was at Expedia, it was basically booking, you know, after the booking, there weren't that many services that Expedia offered other than if something went wrong and you know, you do everything you can to, to help the customer. But actually what we can do is kind of connect all these logistical elements of your travel. So obviously, you know, your Uber to the airport. If you did your hotel booking, we already know where your Uber is. Maybe we'll give you a discount to the hotel.

• 26:37Speaker 06

  And I'm hoping that as we build out travel, we can actually improve the in-market experience. I don't know about you, but like, why do I need to check into a hotel? Like, what's the deal with that, right? Like, you know, I've got my phone and if you have a hotel booking, like maybe you can walk into the hotel and we can give you all the information and you can just go up to your room and maybe your app can act as a key, et cetera. There's a lot more that we want to do in terms of the in-market experience. And it's something that Uber is uniquely positioned to do because we're already in market in almost every city that you're going to want to travel to.

• 27:15Speaker 05

  There are competitors in these markets. Expedia is an interesting partner because he used to be the CEO of Expedia.

• 27:20Speaker 06

  Yeah.

• 27:21Speaker 05

  I assume you just made a phone call and said, hey, what's up? It's me.

• 27:25Speaker 06

  So actually, I had to recuse myself from the process, from the process entirely. The idea, the strategy, let's get deeper into travel. Obviously I was, I was involved with, but because of the conflict, I'm still on the Expedia board. I had to recuse myself from the process. The team ran it and I'm like, guys, what's going on? They're like, we can't talk to you. So they got to, Expedia won because of the great job that that team did. They got no help from me.

• 27:50Speaker 05

  The CEO of Expedia wasn't like, I got a board member breathing down my neck.

• 27:54Speaker 06

  But it wasn't, I had to like recuse myself in those discussions. It was a little awkward, but it all worked out well.

• 28:00Speaker 05

  So obviously Expedia would be a competitor, but they're your partner. There are other competitors. There are the hotel loyalty programs, booking.com exists.

• 28:08Speaker 06

  Yeah.

• 28:08Speaker 05

  They say the same sorts of things that you say.

• 28:10Speaker 06

  Of course.

• 28:10Speaker 05

  They've been on the show saying literally the same sorts of things.

• 28:13Speaker 06

  Connected trip, I think they talk about, right?

• 28:14Speaker 05

  All the time.

• 28:15Speaker 06

  Yeah.

• 28:15Speaker 05

  Uh, why do you need to, so I think a lot of people like checking into the hotel. The, the free water especially is very useful when you, when you arrive in a new hotel. That piece of the puzzle where you're going to connect everybody's backend systems together and build one unified experience where the Uber app is the primary interface. I could abstract that away and say, well, that's everything. That's what OpenAI would like to do. That's what Google would like to do.

• 28:37Speaker 06

  Sure.

• 28:37Speaker 05

  Why is Uber going to win that fight?

• 28:39Speaker 06

  Well, I think it's a different question or service offering in terms of offering the availability of service, but to the extent that you can actually deliver it in market. OpenAI is an incredible company. They build a lot of cool things, but they, they don't live in the probabilistic real world that we live in, you know, it's a, there's a Mike Tyson saying is, um, like everything is there until you get punched in the face.

• 29:07Speaker 05

  Everyone has a plan.

• 29:08Speaker 06

  Yeah, everyone has a plan to get, and you know, we get punched in the face daily, which is drivers are canceling, riders are having issues, et cetera, deliveries are late. And so we already deal with this probabilistic world on the backend where things go wrong all the time. And it's one thing to try to change all of these events together, but, and, and get the logistics right. But to adjust to real world traffic conditions, cancellations, road closures, all of that stuff we do daily. So I just think we're, we're much better equipped to actually fulfill this seamless, delightful

• 29:53Speaker 06

  end-to-end experience from planning to booking, making it incredibly easy, and then to delivery, the actual experience on the ground.

• 30:00Speaker 05

  You know, your partnership with Marriott, for example, Marriott wants those to be their customers. You're the app that everyone's doing everything in that relationship gets intermediated. Is that a tension?

• 30:11Speaker 06

  I mean, it's it's a tension at the same time. It's a tension that everyone deals with, right? Marriott competes with Expedia. To some extent, you could argue that they compete with us, although we're a much smaller player today in travel. Maybe we'll get bigger. We work with Starbucks at Uber Eats. And of course, they'd rather have people come direct to their app. But the fact is that Uber Eats brings them a lot of incremental demand as well. So this co-opetition theme is something that many, many players have been comfortable with for many, many years.

• 30:41Speaker 05

  Comfortable with for many, many years is in one context, right? Everybody has an app and it doesn't really matter. You're all going to open the apps and maybe we can get you to open our app. Now you're in a world where you're going to open an app and maybe an agent's going to go off and do something for you. And the idea of being the everything app in that context, Uber is describing this as a step to being an everything.

• 31:00Speaker 06

  Totally.

• 31:00Speaker 05

  It's in it's in the press materials.

• 31:01Speaker 06

  Yeah, yeah.

• 31:02Speaker 05

  Brian Chesky was on the show. Airbnb is going to do concierge services for travel.

• 31:06Speaker 06

  Yes.

• 31:07Speaker 05

  And they're going to get way out of their lane. And maybe that maybe that's where you may, I haven't talked to Brian in a minute about it.

• 31:13Speaker 05

  OpenAI wants to be in everything. X famously is already the everything app, as you know. We're all using X all day long for everything. Is, do you think the pressure on needing to be that interface is going up because of AI?

• 31:25Speaker 06

  I think the pressure is going up to some extent, but but I think AI is making it possible in a way that it wasn't possible previously. One is these models can adjust to real world conditions in a way that determinants that code can't, right? That's really cool. Whereas you had to build UI interfaces that were tight and relatively limited. AI is allowing for an interface that is unlimited, essentially. You know, you can just tell. The app, what you want, and you can have agents then take that and break up that request and try to deliver it as best you can. So AI is is making possible now. And

• 32:08Speaker 06

  by the way, you can just build much faster. So to going to smart risk, the cost of taking risks is going down. So I think all of that is coming together in an opportunity set that I think a lot of companies recognize, including us, including Airbnb and and the the other companies. And it's going to be a race to many of these new markets. And, you know, we're confident. We've we've raced before. We love competition. But this is this is another trillion dollar plus opportunity. And we've done well with mobility. We've done well with delivery. You know, all of these businesses have been built organically. So I think there's kind of a builder mindset at Uber. And we're going to give it a shot. And so far, the signal is pretty, pretty damn good.

• 32:53Speaker 05

  We have to pause here for a quick break. We'll be right back.

• 33:04Speaker 01

  This episode is brought to you by Michelob Ultra. Good times mean competitions between you and your friends, like seeing who can throw some pigskin the farthest or rush the field the fastest. Winner gets an ultra. Because it's not just a superior light beer, it's also giving fans superior access to their favorite sporting events. Superior is worth playing for. Visit michelobultra.com/superioraccess to enter. Enjoy responsibly. Copyright 2026 Anheuser Busch InBev Michelob Ultra Beer, St. Louis, Missouri.

• 33:32Speaker 02

  Chronic migraine, 15 or more headache days a month, each lasting four hours or more, can make me feel like a spectator in my own life.

• 33:39Speaker 03

  Botox, onabacholynum toxin A prevents headaches in adults with chronic migraine. It's not for those with 14 or fewer headache days a month. It's the number one prescribed branded chronic migraine preventive treatment.

• 33:50Speaker 04

  Prescription Botox is injected by your doctor. Effects of Botox may spread hours to weeks after injection, causing serious symptoms. Alert your doctor right away as difficulty swallowing, speaking, breathing, eye problems, or muscle weakness can be signs of a life-threatening condition. Patients with these conditions before injection are at highest risk. Side effects may include allergic reactions, neck and injection site pain, fatigue, and headache. Allergic reactions can include rash, welts, asthma symptoms, and dizziness. Don't receive Botox if there's a skin infection. Tell your doctor your medical history, muscle or nerve conditions, including ALS, Lou Gehrig's disease, Myasthenia gravis, or Lambert-Eaton syndrome, and medications, including botulinum toxins, as these may increase the risk of serious side effects.

• 34:26Speaker 07

  Why wait? Ask your doctor. Visit botoxchronicmigraine.com or call 1-800-44-BOTOX to learn more.

• 34:33Speaker 08

  This episode is brought to you by Subaru. You know that place your mind always wanders to? The lake? The mountains? The homes of the people you love most? The completely redesigned 2026 Subaru Outback is built to help you get there. With legendary capabilities, standard symmetrical all-wheel drive, and the confidence to go further. The 2026 Subaru Outback. Love never looked so good. Visit Subaru.com/Outback to learn more.

• 35:03Speaker 05

  Welcome back. I'm talking with Uber CEO Dara Khosrowshahi about how everyone seems to want their agentic AI to call you an Uber. Why that's maybe not such a great idea. Last time you were on the show, we talked a lot about agents and accessing Uber as a service inside of an agentic workflow. I was, I asked a lot of CEOs that time. Yeah. This question. Everybody who had a physical product was like, we'll be fine. Mm-hmm. And then it was Amazon, who has an interface to a bunch of drop shippers that is like filing the lawsuits. Right? They have a virtual product. Everybody who was in the world of atoms was like, go ahead and try. Like, try to make another Uber. You just give it a shot. We'll be here when you're waiting. That was very much your attitude. What you said to me was, the price of calling an Uber in ChatGPT should be zero until they

• 35:46Speaker 05

  prove it's valuable, and then I'll figure out what the rate should be. It's been a year.

• 35:50Speaker 06

  Mm hmm.

• 35:51Speaker 05

  Have you seen any meaningful uptake of calling Ubers from ChatGPT?

• 35:55Speaker 06

  No, no, and it doesn't seem to be at this point a priority for a lot of the foundation model companies, whether it's ChatGPT or Gemini. I think they're experimenting with it. But I think, you know, the enterprise market is growing much faster than anyone thought that it was going to. So I think there's been a pivot towards enterprise. And by the way, rightly so, based on the growth rates that we see, based on our internal usage of these foundation models. So at this point, that part of the market hasn't developed. And the cool thing is, we're building some really cool products. You know, you can scribble a shopping list.

• 36:36Speaker 06

  You can take a picture of food that either looks really tasty and we'll put together a shopping list for you. If you tell us what merchant you want to go shopping at, we'll put together the list for you and we'll get it delivered automatically. So a lot of these experiences that I think people thought you'd find on OpenAI, et cetera, you're actually going to find first on an Uber. I wouldn't be surprised if it's built over a period of time, but right now enterprise is coming first and you could argue rightly so.

• 37:08Speaker 05

  Uber is a favorite of agentic demos. It pop up all the time. I'm just going to go down the list.

• 37:14Speaker 06

  Is that right? Yeah. It's kind of an everyday use case. It's great.

• 37:18Speaker 05

  Google and Samsung announced Gemini task integration on the newest Samsung phones, where the model will literally open the Uber app in the background in a virtual container and click around it to get you a car.

• 37:30Speaker 06

  Hmm.

• 37:31Speaker 05

  Have you seen any meaningful rides from that integration?

• 37:34Speaker 06

  Not yet, not yet, but we'd be delighted to see it. I mean, we want to bring more experimentation, more opportunity for our drivers. It's just really small now. It doesn't mean it's not going to be big 10 years from now.

• 37:47Speaker 05

  I'm just, we had a whole year of these.

• 37:49Speaker 06

  Totally, totally.

• 37:50Speaker 05

  Alexa, has Alexa sent you any meaningful rides?

• 37:53Speaker 06

  No. So very, very small.

• 37:55Speaker 05

  Okay, I mean, I can keep going, but it seems like the answer.

• 37:58Speaker 06

  Have you used any of these?

• 37:59Speaker 05

  I have to, I'm required.

• 38:02Speaker 06

  How is it?

• 38:04Speaker 05

  You know, I think they all have the problem. They're slower than me just doing it myself. Like, kind of down the line, they're slower than me just doing it myself. Also, I'm only ever calling a car from work to home or home to work or to the airport. The app is one tap away for all of those experiences.

• 38:17Speaker 06

  And it's pretty, it's pretty easy to use. Now, I do think that one area that, for example, we are looking at is while the front end, the initial demand may come from any agent, I am going to want our pixels in front of you. So for example, I'm perfectly fine with OpenAI calling Uber, but then I want in that web interface and within that ChatGPT app, kind of the Uber pixels and the Uber brand so that you know who is fulfilling that ride for you. So, you know, we'll see how things turn out. If you're an Uber One member, you're going to want to use our product, especially for travel.

• 38:55Speaker 05

  I mean, again, this is a fight that I've seen coming, where getting people out of your app and just using Uber as a backend service is a commodity against every other service, pure play or not. Nobody's going to want this, but it seems like they've all pivoted to enterprise so fast that that fight is delayed or maybe never coming.

• 39:13Speaker 06

  I think it's delayed. It's going to happen because I think the size of the prize is too big. Now, there's, if you talk about kind of history rhyming, not repeating itself, there's some of what, what I went through in my former job at Expedia. If you remember during those times, there was a big debate about Metasearch, right? There were these Metasearch players, Kayak, TripAdvisor, Trivago, that were amalgamating a bunch of travel content. And there was a point at which Metasearch was quite powerful in terms of customer acquisition, et cetera. But as the supply consolidated, really the value started accruing to the suppliers much more than the meta players. And, you know, the travel business consolidating to Expedia,

• 39:58Speaker 06

  Booking.com, Airbnb, there's more, but the three very, very big players. So I do think also on the supply side, when you look at mobility, when you look at delivery, there's usually two or three players in every market. So even if you get that front end being particularly big in a consolidated, let's say, supply marketplace and with our size and scale, multi-platform, all the countries that we operate in, I think we're going to be more than okay in terms of kind of the leverage and the negotiations that happen. I always try to push the negotiations to the back end, build a great experience, figure out kind of the the balance, the economic balance later. But you know, sometimes you've got to figure that stuff out upfront.

• 40:43Speaker 05

  This is a slight difference in the last time you were here. And I'm just noted, the companies are all different, not Uber, but the AI companies, they're all in a slightly different posture than they were a year ago.

• 40:54Speaker 06

  Yeah, totally.

• 40:54Speaker 05

  Right. They're racing towards IPO. They are constantly calling code reds. Like every week, it's a code red at OpenAI.

• 41:01Speaker 06

  It's a cool thing to do.

• 41:02Speaker 05

  Yeah, I mean, we have, we've had CEOs come on the show and say they've called a code red. I'm like, did you actually do it? Like, no.

• 41:07Speaker 06

  We definitely had our share of code reds. And there's, there's a, there's a danger of code red fatigue in companies too, because then it becomes meaningless. So it's a real issue.

• 41:17Speaker 05

  OpenAI was a partner of yours. You've obviously launched things with them. You've used the products. As you broadly think about, okay, we're going to build AI services, we're in need of model provider. Do they feel like a stable partner?

• 41:30Speaker 06

  Yes, their, their products are excellent. For example, we've used, I think, ChatGPT-5.5 for some of the cool stuff that we demoed today in terms of the shopping list or taking pictures, etc. Codex is something that a lot of our devs use. OpenAI has been a strong partner in whatever drama that you see in the markets isn't showing up in terms of the quality of their product. They continue to be first rate.

• 42:00Speaker 05

  The drama in the market is all encompassing. As you and I sit here today, Sam Altman and Elon Musk are in a courtroom arguing with each other.

• 42:06Speaker 06

  Listen, it used to be Uber when I, when I was looking at joining the company. It like reminds me of that. And we got through it. You know, we got through it and it's a great company now. And I think that it's an adjustment that every company has to go through. So many people are interested in how OpenAI does because it's an important company in the world. So they'll, they'll get through this.

• 42:26Speaker 05

  Do the model companies feel interchangeable in a way that has always seemed like a small danger here?

• 42:33Speaker 06

  I think interchangeable is a little bit too strong a word. I mean, I do think that what Anthropic is building, Claude, is it's spectacular. Our developers are using it all the time. Codex is definitely picking up use of our developers. Now, what we do do is we use some of the frontier models and some of the more advanced models to pilot, build demos, if you want to build something quickly. And then what we do look to do is we have, it's much more than an API layer, but we've got a platform, Michelangelo, that has all the data feeds. And then essentially, you're able to switch models. And early on, when

• 43:15Speaker 06

  we're trying to explore something, we will use some of the more advanced models. But then, once you get up to larger volumes, we will try to switch out either cheaper models or open source models to control kind of the costs and the token costs on the backend. Interchangeable is too strong a word, but we definitely experiment with various ones. And at this point, nothing is hardcoded into our systems. And frankly, we're going to make sure that none of them are hardcoded into our systems.

• 43:44Speaker 05

  Right. That seems like a hedge against the companies and their needs and also cost, right? The cost of tokens is still.

• 43:51Speaker 06

  Yeah, I mean, you never want to be overly dependent on one technology unless you're highly confident, or it is very, very, very proprietary. And part of it is that all this stuff is so new. I mean, you and I were talking about Cursor last year, right? And Claude wasn't a thing, at least internally. Now Claude is really, really increasing at incredibly surprising rates internally. So, early on, as this market is developing, we want lots of experimentation. And we want to give our devs the freedom to try a bunch of stuff. I don't want this to be top down, thou shalt here or there. Of course, there's going to be optimization. But, but right now, there's a lot of experimentation

• 44:36Speaker 06

  going on internally.

• 44:39Speaker 05

  We have to take another short break. We'll be back in just a minute.

• 44:50Speaker 01

  This episode is brought to you by Michelob Ultra. Good times mean competitions between you and your friends. Like seeing who can throw some pigskin the farthest, or rush the field the fastest. Winner gets an ultra. Because it's not just a superior light beer, it's also giving fans superior access to their favorite sporting events. Superior is worth playing for. Visit michelobultra.com/superioraccess to enter. Enjoy responsibly. Copyright 2026 Anheuser Busch InBev Michelob Ultra Beer, St. Louis, Missouri.

• 45:19Speaker 02

  Chronic migraine, 15 or more headache days a month, each lasting four hours or more, can make me feel like a spectator in my own life.

• 45:26Speaker 03

  Botox, onabotulinum toxin A, prevents headaches in adults with chronic migraine. It's not for those with 14 or fewer headache days a month. It's the number one prescribed branded chronic migraine preventive treatment.

• 45:37Speaker 04

  Prescription Botox is injected by your doctor. Effects of Botox may spread hours to weeks after injection, causing serious symptoms. Alert your doctor right away. As difficulty swallowing, speaking, breathing, eye problems, or muscle weakness can be signs of a life-threatening condition. Patients with these conditions before injection are at highest risk. Side effects may include allergic reactions, neck and injection site pain, fatigue, and headache. Allergic reactions can include rash, welts, asthma symptoms, and dizziness. Don't receive Botox if there's a skin infection. Tell your doctor your medical history, muscle or nerve conditions, including ALS, Lou Gehrig's Disease, Myasthenia gravis, or Lambert-Eaton Syndrome, and medications, including botulinum toxins, as these may increase the risk of serious side effects.

• 46:13Speaker 02

  Why wait? Ask your doctor. Visit botoxchronicmigraine.com or call 1-800-44-BOTOX to learn more.

• 46:20Speaker 08

  This episode is brought to you by Subaru. You know that place your mind always wanders to? The lake, the mountains? The homes of the people you love most? The completely redesigned 2026 Subaru Outback is built to help you get there. With legendary capabilities, standard symmetrical all-wheel drive, and the confidence to go further. The 2026 Subaru Outback. Love never looked so good. Visit subaru.com/outback to learn more.

• 46:50Speaker 05

  Welcome back. I'm talking with Dara Khosrowshahi, CEO of Uber, about just how weird the experience of running a software company is getting right now. Let me ask you about running a software company in 2026. This is the thing I was most excited to talk to you about. It is true, the last time you were here, we were talking broadly about AI and had all these questions about agents and the big labs coming for you with their consumer chatbots. Maybe that's not happening yet. The thing we did end up talking about, just as you were walking in, is you said, "We had GitHub Copilot, but all the engineers want to use Cursor." And now you're saying, "And Cursor's around, but they're all using Claude Code." Or maybe they're using Codex.

• 47:28Speaker 06

  The increase in Claude Code usage and sometimes the replacement of Cursor usage is fairly remarkable. We use both. They're both terrific products. And then there's a group that's using Codex and they're all really good. And I'd say the big change is with Cursor, it was, you know, coding and coding assist, so to speak, complete. But now these agents and agentic coding is something that is, it's just blowing people away. It's very, very cool.

• 48:00Speaker 05

  And when you say blow people away, I would say many of your peers have gone crazy. Like they have seen agentic coding, it's looked them in the eye and they have responded by losing their minds and saying that the entire structure of a company should change around this. I'll give you some examples. Meta is reportedly going to have teams or 50 people report to one manager. Jack Dorsey can't lay off enough people fast enough. And his goal, he said this out loud, he wants all 6,000 people agentically assisted to report to him at Block. I don't even know how you would, it's a show about org charts and I read that and I thought, "Well, our show's going to keep going for another decade." Like I know what kind of, we're on the cusp of the weirdest org charts in history.

• 48:45Speaker 06

  Yeah, yeah.

• 48:46Speaker 05

  Are you there? Are you saying, "Okay, agentic coding is going to fundamentally change how you construct a software company"?

• 48:52Speaker 06

  We have not. Gone and examined the fundamental org chart of the company yet. I'm not saying it won't happen. We are pushing the company hard. And by the way, I've got to push a company harder to go to first principles in terms of how you work, period. What we found is, and again, our culture is like bottoms up, let people do a bunch of stuff. And listen, the engineers are using it, the debugging, like all the cool stuff is happening as it should. But what we saw is like in sales, right?

• 49:30Speaker 06

  Salespeople now use agents to summarize information on a client that they're going to call to build out a really cool presentation. We're using agents and AI, though I would describe around the edges of how we work. So that's one. And we're not kind of thinking about, well, let's think about the sales function from the bottoms up. Customer service is another example where, you know, we've got agents who generally follow policies. There's a policy, if you're an Uber one, Uber one member and you, your order is delayed by 20 minutes, you know, we're going to give you 15 bucks back because you're a loyal

• 50:15Speaker 06

  customer, et cetera. That's a policy that's in place and there are agents that are following those policies, et cetera. Human agents. Human agents, human agents. And, and we then said, well, let's build virtual agents to follow those policies. And it turns out that actually our policies on a global basis, the documentation is complete crap, to use a technical term. And what happens is, you know, an agent, a human agent, I'll be sitting next to you, be like, hey, do you, what does this policy mean? It's kind of unclear. And you coach me and then I figure it out. Like humans are quite flexible. When we had AI agents go through these policies, they just went nuts. Right? And so one approach was let's rebuild all the documentation and policies the right way.

• 51:00Speaker 06

  And then let's have the agents work based on these policies. But why do we put those policies together in the first place? It was to get to goals and outcomes based on standardized ways to get to those outcomes. I don't want to go bankrupt, but I want to keep you, the Uber One customer member, happy. And so we made a policy to approximate the optimal outcome for the population. All right. But now I can just tell the agent what that outcome is. I want actually to be fair to a person. I want Uber One members to be happy, et cetera. I don't want to go bankrupt. So the approach that we're taking now within customer services, throw away the policies,

• 51:45Speaker 06

  describe to the agent what you're trying to accomplish, and then let the agents go. And obviously, train them on good interactions, bad interactions.

• 51:54Speaker 05

  Wait, can I ask you a foundational philosophical question?

• 51:57Speaker 06

  Yeah.

• 51:57Speaker 05

  Why trust computers to make those determinations and not people?

• 52:01Speaker 06

  Because the model can learn based on the population of everything that is happening versus an individual human just learning based on the experience that he or she is having that day. And models are easier to track and tune than humans are to train.

• 52:19Speaker 05

  Okay, so this is a scale answer. It can see all the data.

• 52:23Speaker 06

  Yeah.

• 52:24Speaker 05

  So you can just describe a generalized outcome and we'll just.

• 52:25Speaker 06

  And you can retrain based on that data and you have perfect visibility into the actions, reactions, and you know, the retraining output, you don't have perfect visibility into, but you can kind of iterate around that. So it does demand a different approach. And it's a little bit back to what you and I were talking about, which is a smart risk. It's a riskier approach. Like, we got to throw stuff out and just completely rebuild in a different way. And I'm really glad, like, it wasn't, in this case, it wasn't me who pushed the Castops team to throw everything out. They were frustrated with the results that they were seeing early on. They're like, we have to be able to do better. We're going to try this out. The signal looks really promising, but I can't tell you it's actually going to work in the end.

• 53:09Speaker 05

  That kind of dynamic customer response.

• 53:11Speaker 06

  Yeah.

• 53:12Speaker 05

  In in terms of pricing, people are making it illegal in this country to dynamic pricing in that way.

• 53:17Speaker 06

  Well, we're.

• 53:18Speaker 05

  Because it feels unfair.

• 53:19Speaker 06

  Yeah, we we're not going to that. That is actually an issue, which is what we don't want to do is have different outcomes based on targeting you versus another person versus another person. But you can have different outcomes because there were circumstances that were different. So for you, if your food was 15 minutes late, another person, you're both Uber One members, another person's food was 45 minutes late, you could actually have different outcomes because actually the circumstances are different. So it's not based on targeting or optimizing based on targeting. It's it's optimizing based on context.

• 53:57Speaker 05

  That's really interesting. It it strikes me that we we could probably do another whole hour on we wrote a bunch of rules for humans and now we have to write a system prompt that isn't the rules.

• 54:06Speaker 06

  It's actually the outcomes that you're trying to get at. Yeah.

• 54:10Speaker 05

  Yeah, that that's.

• 54:11Speaker 06

  We'll see if it works.

• 54:11Speaker 05

  You're gonna.

• 54:12Speaker 06

  See if it works.

• 54:12Speaker 05

  You're gonna come back next year and I'm gonna ask you if it worked.

• 54:14Speaker 06

  Yeah, exactly.

• 54:15Speaker 05

  But let me ask you just more at the base level. When I think about software companies generally, the the creative tension of any software group is you have a PM, you have a designer, you've got some engineers.

• 54:25Speaker 06

  Yeah.

• 54:26Speaker 05

  They all want to be in charge. They all think they're gonna do right. And they all need to work together.

• 54:31Speaker 06

  Yeah.

• 54:31Speaker 05

  And if you get if you can get that right, it's magic. It feels like with the power of vibe coding, everyone is gonna try to do everyone else's job and no one's gonna be good at it. And that is we're all it's all a mess. I can see it happening all over the place.

• 54:46Speaker 06

  Totally.

• 54:46Speaker 05

  Are you rethinking that basic triad inside of Uber?

• 54:50Speaker 06

  So it depends on the kind of project that you're working on. There are some larger projects that you need design, you need proper planning, et cetera. But we are having some product team members, whereas previously, if there were some simple bugs in the code or very, very simple features, they would have to then prioritize it with their engineers, et cetera. Now they're just going in and they are vibe coding and an engineer is gonna review it, the code. But essentially, the product person is going direct into the code base, so to speak, or going direct with an agent into the code base. So I do think for simpler problems, smaller problems, the dynamics are gonna change. We're gonna try it out. We're gonna see what happens.

• 55:35Speaker 05

  When you look at a company like Meta, which seems to just be in the midst of endless rolling layoffs. You know, they're saying it's because AI is making everybody more productive. It might be because they're just freeing up CapEx to go spend on whatever they're spending CapEx on to whatever end that Meta is going to do AI, super intelligence, I'm told. Are you in that same spot where you're like, we're getting more productive, I need less people?

• 55:55Speaker 06

  No, we are, my view is if an engineer is going to be 50% or 200% more productive, I want more engineers. Like, there are, the list of ideas in terms of what we want to build so outscales our, our throughput at this point, that generally we are looking to add more engineers to our employee base. Now, there is a trade off, and we are dealing with a trade off right now as we speak, which is, I don't know if you saw it, but our CTO was talking to a reporter and made a comment,

• 56:34Speaker 06

  which is true, we have blown through our AI token and infrastructure budget for the whole year in about three to four months. And it was a big thing when that happens, but it happened. And the trade off is going to be headcount. So, the, we are budgeting differently. Previously, you would have a headcount budget or plan, you know, doesn't mean it would actually happen, but there's a plan going in, you would have an infra budget. Now, there's an active trade off going on between the two, and to the extent that we have overages in terms of token spend or infra spend, which theoretically those overages

• 57:16Speaker 06

  are products that are being built and are productivity that's being added to our engineers, we're going to hire less aggressively, so to speak. That is a live trade off. How far it's going to go, I don't know at this point.

• 57:27Speaker 05

  Are you all the way at, I'm spending so much on tokens that it's costing me more than hiring one junior engineer?

• 57:33Speaker 06

  We are spending a lot on tokens. I haven't done the math yet, but it's, it's significant. But the throughput is really accelerating. So at this point, it's, it's something that needs to be managed. And I do think it's just taking different muscles. The way that we're managing budgets, it's just, especially on tech, is fundamentally different than how we did three, four years ago.

• 57:54Speaker 05

  All right, well, I'll ask a question that I want to talk to you about autonomy, which is also AI, but in a very different way.

• 57:58Speaker 06

  Physical world, yeah.

• 57:59Speaker 05

  You were on Diary of a CEO, and you said the employees at Uber have created an AI version of Dara to practice presenting. Is that real? And how close are we to AI replacing the CEO?

• 58:12Speaker 06

  So it is real. I have not witnessed the Dara AI, but I, I, it is real. People have done it. Honestly, I don't know how good it is. It's clearly not as good as a real thing. I mean, come on. How's that possible?

• 58:24Speaker 05

  Decoder listeners, every time we do an AI episode, they say the AI should replace the CEO. It is a reflexive comment we get.

• 58:32Speaker 06

  I'm not there yet. I just, I, I think that, um, the AI powered CEO is going to be better than the AI CEO. I think there's a magic in terms of teaming up humans with AI and with agents. And based on what I see, that is a superior product than pure play AI or pure play human.

• 58:56Speaker 05

  You should recuse yourself from this. You have a deep conflict of interest.

• 58:58Speaker 06

  Of course I do. I'm hoping the board sees it that way as well. Maybe the board is planning this and I had no idea.

• 59:04Speaker 05

  I mean, that would be in keeping with the Uber story. That would, that would be there.

• 59:08Speaker 06

  How is AI changing our board processes? I've got to think about that one.

• 59:11Speaker 05

  Oh, I get those pitches. They're very, you don't, you don't want anything to do with those. Let's talk about robots. Actual robots, actual AI in the world. Uber has made a bunch of big investments in robot taxis. I want to start with Rivian. It's over a billion dollars. I think it's 1.2 billion dollars in total commitment to Rivian over some number of years. I just have a really basic question. You and that's partnership in March, you're going to buy up to 50,000 fully autonomous R2 robot taxis by 2031. But it's also called an investment. And I'm just doing the math. I'm like, that's the price of the R2 platform. You're just buying a bunch of cars. Is buying a bunch of cars an investment or are you actually getting equity in Rivian?

• 59:48Speaker 06

  So we actually invested in Rivian equity and we've invested a number of our partners. Usually we will invest in our partners. In a Lucid, in a We Ride, in a, in Av Ride, for example. So it is an investment and it's a vehicle commitment as well. It's both. And it's based on deliverables. Obviously they've got to deliver and based on everything that we've seen from RJ and team. Putting together a first, first class AI team and, and we're confident that they can deliver on those R2s.

• 1:00:17Speaker 05

  Yeah. The deliverables are very vague. I'm just going to read you the press release. Uber will invest up to 1.25 billion in Rivian through 2031, subject to, and I quote, "the achievement of certain autonomous milestones by specific dates."

• 1:00:32Speaker 06

  Well, they are very specific contractually.

• 1:00:35Speaker 05

  I put this into five different AI systems and no one can tell me what.

• 1:00:38Speaker 06

  As far as what you know.

• 1:00:40Speaker 05

  What are the, what are the autonomous milestones?

• 1:00:43Speaker 06

  I could tell you, but then I'd have to kill you.

• 1:00:44Speaker 05

  The reason I'm asking is not, I mean, I desperately want to know the specifics. I'm looking at this industry in total and I will tell you that we've thrown out whatever autonomous milestones we used to have. The level system that everybody used to talk about, that's all gone. No one cares about this anymore. No one's like, we shouldn't do level four, we're doing it. And I can't quite tell you when a car, what milestone autonomy platform has to hit before I can say this is a robotaxi.

• 1:01:12Speaker 06

  So I mean, usually I'll give you examples of milestones, not specific to Rivian. Usually there's a milestone, for example, if you release in market with a vehicle operator. Usually one other milestone, maybe if you take the vehicle operator out. You can only take the vehicle operator out to the extent that you complete a safety case that we put together along with the autonomy provider. Then another deliverable might be delivering a certain number of cars that are NVO capable, that have a redundancy at a certain bill of materials as well, at a certain cost. So those are examples of deliverables that have to do with either capability or economics.

• 1:01:57Speaker 06

  Because ultimately this is about going to market with a product that's proving to be a very, very popular product.

• 1:02:03Speaker 05

  Your big partner in the past was Waymo.

• 1:02:06Speaker 06

  Yes.

• 1:02:06Speaker 05

  Waymo has gotten there in many cases to some of the kinds of milestones you're striving. You're obviously different side away from Waymo. You've got the Rivian deal. You mentioned Lucid, you're going to buy at least 35,000 Lucid vehicles designed exclusively for use as part of Uber's robotaxi.

• 1:02:22Speaker 06

  Yeah, and a partnership with Neuro.

• 1:02:23Speaker 05

  And a partnership with Neuro, which is the platform there.

• 1:02:26Speaker 06

  Yes.

• 1:02:26Speaker 05

  And overall, you're going to commit some $10 billion to autonomous efforts. You've launched Uber Autonomous Solutions. That feels like a bet on this is happening, but we don't know who's going to win. You're diversified.

• 1:02:39Speaker 06

  So it's a little bit different from that in that. We believe that it is going to happen. And we believe that just like there isn't going to be one foundation model to rule them all. There isn't going to be one physical world foundation model to to rule them all. And all the evidence that we see is, yes, Waymo has passed the finish line. They are the leader. They are in many ways inspiration for many, many companies in this industry. They're a great partner of ours in Atlanta and Austin. There are many other companies that are getting to the finish line. A We Ride, for example, or a Pony.ai or a Baidu. These are Chinese companies are already at the finish line.

• 1:03:24Speaker 06

  And we are in market, for example, with We Ride in in the Middle East. And there are players like a Neuro or a Wabi or an Avride or a Wave, all of whom are accelerating to the finish line. And if anything, the speed of getting to the finish line is accelerating. One, model capabilities are much, much better now. It used to be kind of deterministic, you know, kind of code that you had to slog through. Now, obviously, it's learning AI models. SIM capability is much better so that data will go much further in terms of in terms of model training. And what we're trying to do with AV Solutions is we're trying to build out the whole necessary ecosystem

• 1:04:10Speaker 06

  around these companies so that they can focus on what they do best, which is training these models to get them to be to superhuman safety. We can help them get there, for example, with data collect. And we can both kind of then get to market as quickly as possible. So it's not, I would say, a diversification bet. It's a bet that there are going to be many players and as a platform. We've always been supply led, which is the way to grow our platform is to build out supply, whether that's more drivers or whether that's more restaurants or more hotels. Then we're able to, as we build out liquidity of supply, demand shows up and just like we

• 1:04:53Speaker 06

  want every safe human driver on the platform, we want every safe robot driver on the platform, whether that's a Waymo driver or a Neuro driver or an Avride or a WeRide. It's a bet that we're making, which is there won't be one physical AI model to rule them all.

• 1:05:08Speaker 05

  There's some real confidence in this bet. You know, I've talked to a lot of rideshare CEOs over the years, a lot of autonomy CEOs over the years, and it's always been 10 years away.

• 1:05:17Speaker 06

  Yeah.

• 1:05:18Speaker 05

  The confidence I'm hearing from you is, oh, this is, this is happening. We're, we're spending a lot of money to get there faster.

• 1:05:23Speaker 06

  All the evidence we see is, is that it's happening. And, and you know, you, you can, Waymo has shown the way.

• 1:05:30Speaker 06

  Lot of Waymo engineers now are working in other companies. For example, the Chinese players have shown the way and the, you've seen it, the speed of foundation model development, whether it's digital foundation models or physical foundation models, you know, Nvidia is betting on this as well. You know, the, these are big bets made by capable companies and, and we think we're on the right track here.

• 1:05:56Speaker 05

  In the context of our conversation, I'm going to bring up the trade off.

• 1:05:58Speaker 06

  Sure.

• 1:05:59Speaker 05

  By saying it's going to be more real, you no longer get to kick the can on, we're not going to have drivers in the cars, which famously got Travis Kalanick in a lot of trouble by saying, I want to get the driver out of the car.

• 1:06:08Speaker 06

  Yeah.

• 1:06:09Speaker 05

  Long, long ago.

• 1:06:09Speaker 06

  Yeah.

• 1:06:10Speaker 05

  Because autonomy was so far away, we just didn't have to solve this problem.

• 1:06:13Speaker 06

  Mm hmm.

• 1:06:14Speaker 05

  You have been on podcasts recently saying, oh, this problem is here. I don't know what's going to happen to 9.5 million Uber drivers when autonomy comes. You literally said, I don't know to Stephen.

• 1:06:25Speaker 06

  Well, if you don't know, you should say it, you know, it's now, here's what I know. 10 years from now, I am. 90% certain that we're going to have more drivers on our overall platform than we do today. Now, I don't know if that's going to be true in San Francisco, but with the way that the business is growing and the capability of building these cars at the right bill of materials in all the markets that we operated, not just the high cost of markets, we're going to have plenty of drivers and we also are actively looking to build out more use cases for drivers that are more complex. You know, one of the announcements that we made was personal shopper, right?

• 1:07:07Speaker 06

  It was courier, people started hacking courier, asking Uber couriers to go shop for them. So we decided to productize that as well. That's a very, very complicated interaction. It's a random store, take a picture of the goods. This is, this is what I want. So we're building out much more complex use cases for humans to migrate on to as more of the work is being automated. 20 years from now, I don't know what that's going to look like because then you really start increasing capabilities. And I think these are big societal questions. It's going to be true of white collar workers and it's going to be true of certain kinds of blue collar work as well. And, you know, I think CEOs should talk about this, not, not in a way to like scare people,

• 1:07:52Speaker 06

  but we should also be honest about it, which is I've never seen a wave of technology that has direct impact on how companies work and how people have worked at with the accelerated pace that I'm seeing today. Doesn't mean that society can't adjust, but the pace of change here, it's pretty remarkable.

• 1:08:15Speaker 05

  One of my theories about the extremely negative polling on AI is that it's fundamentally enterprise technology. You've described this even in this conversation. The frontier models, those companies are moving to enterprise use cases. You at Uber are using them in enterprise context and there are not great consumer products.

• 1:08:34Speaker 06

  Not yet, not yet. Yeah.

• 1:08:37Speaker 05

  I haven't seen them. Maybe they're coming.

• 1:08:38Speaker 06

  I mean, listen, we're trying to do that. And it's these moments of surprise and delight where, you know, you can talk to your Uber to get an Uber, lots of complex situations. You can transcript a shopping list, take a picture, you know.

• 1:08:52Speaker 05

  But I don't think that stuff is going to change the overall polling on this is a threat that will take my job away.

• 1:08:57Speaker 06

  Listen, if it's your job, I think, I think you're right. Yeah.

• 1:08:59Speaker 05

  And so this dynamic of everybody is showing up saying the jobs are going away. And mostly in because it's so good at writing code, right? Like, this is a weird kind of disconnected dynamic for regular people. Uber needs customers. You need people with money to want to ride around. Like, how do you see that economy playing around?

• 1:09:19Speaker 06

  So I think that it's right now, the talk is louder than what we see in the market, right? The economy remains robust. The consumer remains robust. We don't see white collar people out of work at this point. So I just don't see it in market. Now, the fear that you see might be a leading indicator of what's to come. But at this point, I see no signal in our actual business that it's having any impact on consumers at large.

• 1:09:51Speaker 05

  What do you ascribe the extremely negative polling around AI to?

• 1:09:57Speaker 06

  I do think that it's some fear mongering from the press. They love the drama. Are you, are you part of the press or no?

• 1:10:05Speaker 05

  Yeah, if I had this, if I had this level of influence, you can point at me all you want.

• 1:10:11Speaker 06

  But, but listen, it's, it's a conversation that people are constantly having. It's a dramatic conversation. And I do think like,

• 1:10:18Speaker 06

  machines replacing humans has been a theme for eons, right? And, and what you do see in manufacturing, for example, with automation is that machines complement humans. And then there are other capabilities that humans always adjust to. It's just things are moving so fast now that I think the fear is it's out there. My, I've got 14 year old twin boys and, and two other older kids. My 14 year old kid is like, Dad, why should I study? I'm not going to be able to have a job. Like we had an house just. Blown away. My 14 year old is asking me now, maybe he didn't want to study.

• 1:10:57Speaker 05

  This does feel like the main thing 14 year olds say.

• 1:11:00Speaker 06

  Yeah, exactly. So it's it's in the ether. You see signal. There are some companies like you mentioned who are acting on it. Um, we'll see when then what happens in the next two years, but I don't see how it's going to reverse. Once we get more data, maybe societal will, maybe the reality will be less dramatic than some would make it out to be. And then we'll see, we'll do our best.

• 1:11:24Speaker 05

  I mean, I would love for, I would love for the, to be real that it's the press. I just, I, the media history is not at a moment of intense strength right now, right? It is contracting in major ways.

• 1:11:35Speaker 06

  You know, that there has been some, some, uh, I, I do think that the media is incentivized sometimes to overdramatize these things. Could be real. Maybe it's not. I do think that, that there is a reality in it. The question is, how quickly is it going to change going to happen? And will we be able to, will society be able to adjust fast enough?

• 1:11:55Speaker 05

  Look, I get all my news from X, the everything app, which assures me on the daily that AGI is just around the corner. Um, I want to ask you the, the question I ask every time I talk to you. Uh, I always take an Uber to come see you. It's just my little tradition and I always ask the driver.

• 1:12:09Speaker 06

  Thank you.

• 1:12:10Speaker 05

  Uh, the drivers always have the same question. So I have the same question every year.

• 1:12:14Speaker 06

  Sure.

• 1:12:14Speaker 05

  And then at this time, I actually got a very detailed follow up question.

• 1:12:17Speaker 06

  Oh, cool. All right.

• 1:12:18Speaker 05

  Uh, the drivers all want to know, how are they going to get paid more?

• 1:12:21Speaker 06

  Well, uh, they are going to get paid more by some of the newer jobs that we're giving them, you know, shopping, for example, on a per hour basis can pay more. But I do think that driver pay isn't, is based on kind of what market rate pay is essentially, right? The local pay goes up and down based on the cost, kind of the spot cost of labor in a particular market. So I think the way that drivers are going to get paid more is the cost of labor generally goes up or goes down. Right now, the cost of labor is fairly steady and driver pay has been fairly steady nationwide. It's probably $32, $33 per utilized hour.

• 1:13:02Speaker 06

  Here in New York City is over $50 per utilized hour. So drivers are making decent money. Of course they're going to want to make more money.

• 1:13:09Speaker 05

  They'll want to make more money.

• 1:13:10Speaker 06

  Of course.

• 1:13:10Speaker 05

  Autonomy changes that rate?

• 1:13:16Speaker 06

  Uh, I don't think significantly. I think that drivers are going to probably take longer trips. When we see autonomous, autonomous inventory coming into a market, we slow down driver recruitment because we want the drivers who are in market making as much. So at this point in markets like Atlanta, like Austin, where we have a significant autonomy presence, because we've reduced recruiting, driver pay is actually up. And I'm hoping that we can continue those trends for a long time.

• 1:13:47Speaker 05

  I'm glad you brought up utilized hours because this is the very detailed follow up. It's actually good because you brought up all the keywords of this question. So you mentioned Westchester. I live in Westchester. The drivers in Westchester are allowed to drive into New York City. They are not allowed to pick up in New York City and drive back to Westchester. So they lose, it's an hour. They literally lose one utilized hour. So I've been directly requested that you go and lobby the city and state so that they can go home with a utilized hour instead of an empty run.

• 1:14:15Speaker 06

  We have already been lobbying. Some of these regulations have unintended consequences. New York is unfortunately one of the most highly regulated markets out there. Significant amount of your fare goes to the city, et cetera. I think Ubers are too expensive here. And I think regulation sometimes goes over the top. It's something that I will absolutely take to the powers that be.

• 1:14:43Speaker 05

  The power that the bee in this city is Zaron Mondami. Have you met with Zaron Mondami?

• 1:14:47Speaker 06

  Uh, I have seen him speak. I have not met him one on one yet, but I look forward to, to that dialogue.

• 1:14:54Speaker 05

  Well, here's my tips. One, say you love New York City. He loves it when you say you love New York City. And two, tell him the drivers want the return trips from both the airports and the city.

• 1:15:02Speaker 06

  I will absolutely relay that to him. Maybe he listens to your podcast. You never know.

• 1:15:06Speaker 05

  Uh, we know some people. Um, the same thing. I can't tell you. I can't tell you what the milestones are. Dara, this is always a pleasure. Thank you so much.

• 1:15:14Speaker 06

  Thank you. Really appreciate it.

• 1:15:18Speaker 05

  I'd like to thank Dara for taking the time to join me on Decoder, and thank you for listening. I hope you enjoyed it. If you'd like to let us know what you thought about this episode, or really, anything else at all, drop us a line. You can email us at [email protected]. We really do read all the emails. Or you can hit me up directly on Threads or Blue Sky. We're also on YouTube. You can check out full episodes at DecoderPod. It's the same handle on TikTok and Instagram. If you like Decoder, please share it with your friends and subscribe wherever you get your podcasts. Decoder is production The Verge and part of the Vox Media Podcast Network. The show is produced by Kate Cox and Nick Statt. This episode was edited by Xander Adams. Our editorial director is Kevin McShane. The Decoder music is by Breakmaster Cylinder. We'll see you next time.

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