Uber's Own Numbers: Just Four Rides Booked Via AI Agents in Its Busiest Week

Uber has released a stat that should temper the excitement around AI booking assistants: during its single busiest week of October — Halloween week — the platform processed roughly 320 million trips and orders across rides and Uber Eats. AI agents accounted for exactly four of those ride bookings.

Food delivery did slightly better, but not by much. Just 500 Uber Eats orders out of that week’s volume came through an AI agent, according to comments made on the company’s third-quarter earnings call.

“It is very, very early and very limited traction that we are seeing so far. Listen, we hope that there will be more traction.” — CEO Dara Khosrowshahi

The Math Doesn’t Favor Agents Yet

CFO Balaji Krishnamurthy laid out the figures for analysts, and the gap between agent-driven activity and the rest of Uber’s business is stark. Four rides. Five hundred deliveries. Against a nine-figure weekly total.

Khosrowshahi offered a plausible explanation: speed. Booking a car on Uber takes about 50 seconds on average, and reordering a favorite meal runs roughly 90 seconds. An AI agent stepping in to handle those tasks isn’t saving much — if any — time.

• Ride bookings via AI agent: 4 in Halloween week
• Uber Eats orders via AI agent: 500 in the same week
• Total platform volume that week: ~320 million trips and orders
• Average in-app ride booking time: 50 seconds
• Average in-app food reorder time: 90 seconds

Uber isn’t alone in seeing thin agent uptake. DoorDash reported on its own earnings call that only a few hundred AI-agent orders have come through so far, with nearly all customers still using the app directly.

Why Uber Is Still Betting on Agents

Despite the tiny numbers, Khosrowshahi sounded optimistic about where this goes. He framed AI assistants as another channel to pull demand onto Uber’s platform rather than a threat to its app.

“We think that is another opportunity to reach our platform,” he said, adding that agents should be a net positive for ecosystem demand.

He also noted there are around eight major AI assistants in the market today and expects that count to pass ten. Every AI system company, he said, is currently in conversation with Uber.

The broader context helps explain the hype. Personal AI startups have multiplied, with Instinct raising at a $10 billion valuation and Meta’s Muse reportedly topping 10 million users. OpenAI, Anthropic, Google and others are all pushing agent products that can transact on a user’s behalf.

Early adoption data from public companies tells a different story than the investor enthusiasm. The agentic web, at least when it comes to hailing a car or ordering dinner, is still in its infancy — and Uber’s four rides are about as clear a snapshot of that as any.