Uber Only Had Four Rides Booked By AI Agents Last Week

Is agentic AI overhyped? You may want to believe so if you read what Uber executives recently had to say about the technology. During the company’s Q3 2026 earnings call (via TechCrunch), Balaji Krishnamurthy, Uber’s chief financial officer, wasn’t afraid to admit that only 4 Uber rides were booked by AI agents during the busy week of Halloween.

“We had one of our largest weeks last week because it was Halloween,” Krishnamurthy said. “So we did just around 320 million trips on Uber and Uber Eats. The volumes coming from AI agents for Uber Eats were around 500 (…) And for our Rides business, it was a grand total of 4 trips that we have fulfilled from agents.”

Uber currently supports two types of agentic AI experiences: There’s a Voice Booking Agent built into the Uber app, and the Uber Rides MCP connector that works with any AI Agent, including assistants on smart glasses, watches and earbuds. However, that doesn’t seem to move the needle yet.

“So it is very, very early and very limited traction that we are seeing so far,” said Uber CEO Dara Khosrowshahi. “Listen, we hope that there will be more traction (…) We think our direct services are going to be the most delightful and easy, but we will work with third parties. It is just very, very early. And we wanna make sure we are not dependent on one player. And I think we are very well positioned in this environment going forward.”

During the earnings calls, Uber’s CEO also said that the mean time for manually booking a ride in Uber is 50 seconds. In Uber Eats, the median time for a user to reorder their favorite food is 90 seconds. While AI agents in and outside Uber can now take care of that, the time savings aren’t going to be exactly significant for this specific use case.

Overall, the two Uber executives are pointing their fingers as the current dilemma many tech companies are currently facing: Embracing agentic AI to not miss out on the hype, at the risk of making their mobile apps ultimately irrelevant.

OpenAI and other AI companies will likely be very happy to see users become even more reliant on their chatbots for most common tasks. However, we’re probably not ready for this paradigm shift yet.

Ultimately, there may well be a way to make apps coexist with AI agents. Earlier this week, Apple released the first iOS 27.3 beta, which makes the new Siri AI open to all developers. This will allow Apple’s assistant to use iOS apps on users’ behalf using the new App Intents system.

These new Siri AI capabilities won’t become available to iPhone users for a couple of months, however. And Apple still needs to figure out how to make its new assistant available on iOS, iPadOS, and watchOS in the EU.