On top of its sprawling ride-share and delivery service empire, Uber now also wants to be an AI company.
The company’s third quarter earnings call on Tuesday morning was evidence of this, as Uber executives shared all the ways that they were hoping to drive earnings growth for the company. Two of the five core strategic areas that executives will be focusing on are AI-related.
The first one is a recently announced pilot program that allows the drivers and couriers using the app to make a couple extra bucks by training AI models. Uber users will now be able to complete and get compensated for micro-tasks like uploading photos, annotating security footage, recording themselves speaking in their native language, submitting documents, or judging responses. The feature is called “Digital Tasks” and is currently only available to drivers and couriers in India and the United States, but executives plan to expand the user base, hoping even to attract users beyond current Uber drivers and couriers.
“Some of the roles require PhDs, for example, in physics, in order to get the gig done, so to speak,” Uber CEO Dara Khosrowshahi said in the earnings call.
The initiative is a part of Uber AI Solutions, the company’s AI data services business. Khosrowshahi said that the business is “landing a ton of customers.”
It might seem like an odd pivot for a transportation and logistics focused tech platform, but it is all a part of the company’s main goal of making Uber an everything app for both transportation and “flexible” work.
“Another way of looking at our platform is that we’re a platform for work, and the first kind of work that we have gone after is transportation. But we can empower other kinds of work as well, which is what Uber AI Solutions is all about,” Khosrowshahi said.
The second way that Uber is hoping to use AI to drive earnings is through autonomous vehicles and it has everything to do with Uber’s ambitions to be an everything app for transportation. Uber wants to integrate “human drivers and autonomous vehicles into a single marketplace,” Khosrowshahi said.
As a result, Uber is going all-in on robotaxis. Last week, the company announced that it will be partnering with Nvidia to build a fleet of 100,000 robotaxis, that will start its build-out in 2027.
In the earnings call, Khosrowshahi admitted that autonomous vehicles are not yet profitable, and likely won’t be for at least a few more years.
Beyond the issue of a lag in profitability, robotaxis are also riddled with safety concerns. Just last week, a beloved bodega cat in San Francisco was killed after being hit by a vehicle belonging to the robotaxi giant Waymo. The incident caused public outrage and pushed a city supervisor to call for legislation that would allow counties to be able to ban autonomous vehicles.
The timing for that couldn’t have been worse for Uber, which just last week announced that it would begin testing robotaxis in San Francisco in partnership with electric vehicle company Lucid Motors and autonomous vehicle maker Nuro.
But despite all that, the Uber chief was still optimistic about the technology’s future. He suggested that ten years from now, “every single new car sold” will have autonomous abilities.
“That is a very bright future for the world, because it will make the world safer,” he said.
