Uber CEO on AI, Flights, Business Travel

14.11.2023 - 15:09 / skift.com / Dara Khosrowshahi / Justin Dawes

Uber is working on a lot of projects to push its business beyond its traditional focus. 

The company is continuing to experiment with other forms of travel booking, as Uber CEO Dara Khosrowshahi highlighted during the Skift Global Forum in September. 

Khosrowshahi in an earnings call last week shared details about some of these projects, including its approach to machine learning and adding adding more travel services. 

One technology that Uber has adopted uses computer vision — a type of AI that allows computers to recognize objects in images and videos — to “read” and transcribe onboarding documents from new drivers. 

Uber is working on implementing GitHub Copilot as a way to increase productivity in software development. Developed by GitHub and OpenAI, the platform makes suggestions as developers type and can provide coding suggestions in response to natural language prompts. GitHub says the platform can increase productivity by 55%.

Uber is working on implementing AI tools to help customer service agents. He said the tool evaluates a customer’s history and provides suggestions to the agent about how to handle certain issues based on the policy for a certain geography. 

He also said because Uber has a range of services that is growing, the amount of data it is gathering will benefit the company as it looks to further implement AI in the future. 

Khosrowshahi continues to say there’s potential for Uber to expand into other areas of travel. 

In 2022, nearly 700 million trips globally were taken by users who were outside of their primary cities, he said. Each quarter, about 20% of users take trips domestically. 

“So our users, they’re high-income earners, they tend to travel a lot and that becomes a good segment for us to target,” Khosrowshahi said.

In the UK, Uber is piloting booking services for buses, trains, flights, and more. Of the users in the UK who have booked a bus or train on Uber, 60% of them are already repeating those bookings. And 25% of users are repeating flight bookings through Uber. 

That repeat business in the UK pilot makes Uber optimistic about rolling out the service in other markets.  

Uber is continuing to add services meant to appeal to business travelers. Uber for Business says it works with more than 170,000 companies. Khosrowshahi said the company is looking at establishing business in other verticals, as well, like health and transit. 

“We’ve got multiple avenues for growth, and travel and business are just one amongst many.”