← Decoder with Nilay Patel
Decoder with Nilay Patel
Dara Khosrowshahi on replacing Uber drivers — and himself — with AI
01:14:19
Uber’s CEO on his plan to make Uber an everything app and take over travel.
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- [00:01]
Host/Announcer
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- [02:04]
Nilay Patel
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 Khosrowshawi. 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 in your 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 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, Dar 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 Agentix 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 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 were 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 the 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 Khosrowshawi. Here we. Dharakashari, the CEO of Uber. Welcome back to Decoder.
- [04:32]
Dara Khosrowshahi
Thank you very much. Good to be back.
- [04:34]
Nilay Patel
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
- [04:39]
Dara Khosrowshahi
are chock full of news for you. Chocolate news.
- [04:42]
Nilay Patel
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 in 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 in decision making. And I just want to do them as a little lightning round at the top. Sure. 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 lately. We're making big decisions. Even expanding the app is a big decision. Has your fundamental framework changed?
- [05:34]
Dara Khosrowshahi
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. It's more about playing it safe. You're a 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 for us, we've got almost $10 billion in cash flow. And when I first joined, if we made a billion dollar mistake, it would be a disaster. Right. 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. 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 set in stone, 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 decisions, but then smart risk taking as well. We've got to keep taking smart risks as a company. 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.
- [07:06]
Nilay Patel
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 risks without that fear of failure. Really important. How do you think about the stakes? Like how big of a risk is an individual software engineer to Uber allowed to take?
- [07:24]
Dara Khosrowshahi
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 just some people talk about celebrating mistakes, like I'm not going to celebrate a mistake. Right. 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 have meetings, we talk about it, 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 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.
- [08:41]
Nilay Patel
Put this into 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?
- [08:50]
Dara Khosrowshahi
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 is 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, 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, 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. 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 rideshare, 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. About six years later, Sachin Kansal, 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 approach it differently. And for example, with taxis, because we don't have the data inside of the taxi as to whether or not 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. 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 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.
- [11:18]
Nilay Patel
We're going back to risk because you have a bunch of new products that seem risky.
- [11:21]
Dara Khosrowshahi
Yeah.
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Nilay Patel
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 is 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 for mobility and delivery, and 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 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.
- [12:01]
Dara Khosrowshahi
The only Change in structure, cause I do value stability is that I now have a president 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 a potential of being just as big as the mobility business. 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 all Lyft. The only thing Lyft cares about, at least historically, was U.S. 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 at once, to have skill sets in multiple business lines. And so to make up for that, we had mobility team, delivery team. We had a bunch of common structures and services platform. So where it came together was the 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 eaps, 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 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. I 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 a P and L got in the way 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, 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 seeing we've the number of consumers using both Rides and eats has 6x 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.
- [15:48]
Nilay Patel
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 off.
- [15:55]
Dara Khosrowshahi
Everything's a trade off.
- [15:56]
Nilay Patel
Yeah, we might use this compute instead of doing this other thing and that putting a pixel on this screen might take a customer away from this line of business. And so you've installed a CEO just to manage that trade off more holistically.
- [16:08]
Dara Khosrowshahi
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 the it's a P and L. And obviously often you have to manage for all of above.
- [16:23]
Nilay Patel
You know, my joke on this show constantly is if you tell me your org chart, I can tell you 80% of your problems. You know, it's like all the companies are kind of the same and I can get to about 80% of the attention 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. 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.
- [17:00]
Dara Khosrowshahi
Here 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 compound it over five years, over 10 years, you get the results that we've gotten, 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 want 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.
- [17:31]
Nilay Patel
So the news here in that context feels like, oh, we're going to bet on the platform.
- [17:35]
Dara Khosrowshahi
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.
- [17:43]
Nilay Patel
Okay, I'm going to be very reductive here though. The last time you were here, I described Uber as a magic button that made a Toyota Highlander appear in my life wherever I am in the world, almost statistically, like something like a Toyota
- [17:56]
Dara Khosrowshahi
Highlander would show up.
- [17:57]
Nilay Patel
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 toilet. 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. The news here is you're doing hotel booking in partnership with Expedia. You've got shopping assistance now. The cars might have coffee in them.
- [18:18]
Dara Khosrowshahi
We got a lot going on.
- [18:20]
Nilay Patel
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 in platform bet.
- [18:29]
Dara Khosrowshahi
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 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, 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 the 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 100 million of our riders now are taking rides to and from airports every single year. 100 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 Trane 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 contacts. 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.
- [20:54]
Nilay Patel
Tell me about the. The insight that led to that risk. Because I think about Uber and I'm either. I just need to get somewhere, so I'm gonna open the app and the time sense of Uber is like, right now, I need something right now.
- [21:06]
Dara Khosrowshahi
Totally.
- [21:07]
Nilay Patel
Um, or I'm going to the airport tomorrow and I live in a reasonably remote area. I need to make sure the car's gonna. So I'm gonna 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 yes. Something bad has happened. If that is the occurrence. A hotel feels like the time horizon of needing a hotel is much longer than anything Uber has previously offered, at least in my experience.
- [21:30]
Dara Khosrowshahi
Yeah, yeah.
- [21:30]
Nilay Patel
So that's a bet. You got to 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.
- [21:38]
Dara Khosrowshahi
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 back end. 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, 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 upped 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 upper 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 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 Westchester 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 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 it advanced. 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.
- [24:29]
Nilay Patel
Yeah, I feel like hardcore travelers who know to reserve an Uber, who are some of your best customers. They like price shopping, hotels.
- [24:39]
Dara Khosrowshahi
Yes.
- [24:39]
Nilay Patel
And there's a lot of credit card points in the world. My sister's a credit card points person.
- [24:43]
Dara Khosrowshahi
Yes.
- [24:44]
Nilay Patel
It's frankly a little terrifying, but she's really good at it. How are you going to compete with that? Because that's the customer, in my mind, the customer who knows to book a hotel. And 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.
- [25:00]
Dara Khosrowshahi
How do you compete with that? 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. And by the way, I don't believe
- [25:16]
Nilay Patel
you because this worked out too well.
- [25:18]
Dara Khosrowshahi
I'm just letting you say it, 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 1 members to try the booking experience and then we'll go from there. And I do think that this would be a failure if it ends with hotel booking. 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 a 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 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 that, your hotel booking, we already know where your Uber is, maybe we'll give you a discount to the hotel. 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 give you all the information and you can just go up to your room and maybe your app can act as a key, etc. 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, there are
- [27:21]
Nilay Patel
competitors in these markets. Expedia is an interesting partner because he used to be the CEO of Expedia. I assume you're made a phone call and said, hey, what's up? It's me.
- [27:30]
Dara Khosrowshahi
So actually I had to recuse myself from the process entirely. The idea, the strategy, let's get deeper into travel. Obviously 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. Sorry.
- [27:56]
Nilay Patel
The CEO of Expedia wasn't like I got a board member breathing down my neck.
- [27:59]
Dara Khosrowshahi
It wasn't. I had to like recuse myself in those discussions. It was a little awkward, but it all worked out well.
- [28:05]
Nilay Patel
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. They say the same sorts of things that you say. Of course, they've been on the show saying literally the same sorts of things.
- [28:18]
Dara Khosrowshahi
Connected Trip I think they talk about. Right.
- [28:19]
Nilay Patel
All the time.
- [28:20]
Dara Khosrowshahi
Yeah.
- [28:21]
Nilay Patel
Why do you need a hotel? I think a lot of people like checking into the hotel. The free water especially is very useful 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. Why is Uber going to win that fight?
- [28:44]
Dara Khosrowshahi
Well, I think it's a different question or service offering in terms of offering the availability of the 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 don't live in the probabilistic real world that we live in. You know, there's a Mike Tyson saying is like everything is Ethereum until you get punched in the face.
- [29:12]
Nilay Patel
Everyone has a plan.
- [29:13]
Dara Khosrowshahi
Everyone has a plan. 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 back end where things go wrong all the time. And it's one thing to try to chain all of these events together, but, 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, end to end experience. From planning to booking, making it incredibly easy, and then to delivery the actual experience on the ground.
- [30:05]
Nilay Patel
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 attention.
- [30:16]
Dara Khosrowshahi
I mean, 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 coopetition theme is something that many, many players have been comfortable with for many, many years.
- [30:46]
Nilay Patel
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 in everything. Totally. It's in the press materials. Brian Chesky was on the show. Airbnb is going to do concierge services for travel and they're going to get way out of their lane and maybe that's where you may have. I haven't talked to Brian in a minute about it. 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. Do you think the pressure on needing to be that interface is going up because of AI?
- [31:30]
Dara Khosrowshahi
I think the pressure is going up to some extent, 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 determinists 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 making possible now. And by the way, you can just build much faster. So to go into 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 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.
- [32:57]
Nilay Patel
We have to pause here for a quick break. We'll be right back.
- [33:08]
Host/Announcer
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- [36:28]
Nilay Patel
Welcome back. I'm talking with Uber CEO Dara Khosrowshawi about how everyone seems to want their agentic AI to call you an Uber and 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 will tell you I asked a lot of CEOs that time. This question, everybody who had a physical product was like we'll be fine. And then it was Amazon who has an interface to a bunch of dropshippers that is like filing the lawsuits.
- [36:56]
Dara Khosrowshahi
Right? They have a virtual product.
- [36:57]
Nilay Patel
Everybody 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 and ChatGPT should be zero until they prove it's valuable, and then I'll figure out what the rate should be. It's been a year. Have you seen any meaningful uptake of calling Ubers from ChatGPT?
- [37:20]
Dara Khosrowshahi
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, 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 a 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, etc. 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.
- [38:33]
Nilay Patel
Uber is a favorite of agentic demos you pop up all the time. I'm just going to go down the list.
- [38:39]
Dara Khosrowshahi
Is that right? Yeah, it's kind of an everyday use case. It's great.
- [38:42]
Nilay Patel
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. Have you seen any meaningful rides from that integration?
- [38:59]
Dara Khosrowshahi
Not yet. Not yet, but we'd be delighted to see it. I mean, we. 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.
- [39:12]
Nilay Patel
I'm just. We had a whole year of these.
- [39:14]
Dara Khosrowshahi
Totally, totally.
- [39:15]
Nilay Patel
Alexa has Alexa Sent you any meaningful rides?
- [39:17]
Dara Khosrowshahi
No. Small. Very, very small.
- [39:19]
Nilay Patel
Okay. And I can keep going, but it seems like the answer.
- [39:22]
Dara Khosrowshahi
Have you used any of these?
- [39:24]
Nilay Patel
I have. I'm required. And how is it, 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.
- [39:41]
Dara Khosrowshahi
Exactly. And 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.
- [40:19]
Nilay Patel
I mean, again, this is the fight that I've seen coming where getting people out of your app and just using Uber as a backend service, as 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.
- [40:37]
Dara Khosrowshahi
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. 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, etc. 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 consolidated into Expedia, 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, multiplatform, 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 balance, the economic balance later. But, you know, sometimes you've got to figure that stuff out up front.
- [42:07]
Nilay Patel
This is a slight difference in the last time you were here, I 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.
- [42:18]
Dara Khosrowshahi
Yeah, totally.
- [42:19]
Nilay Patel
Right? They're. They're racing towards ipo. They are constantly calling Code Reds. Like every week it's a Code Red.
- [42:25]
Dara Khosrowshahi
It's a cool thing to do.
- [42:26]
Nilay Patel
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?
- [42:31]
Dara Khosrowshahi
Like, no, 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.
- [42:42]
Nilay Patel
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 need a model provider. Do they feel like a stable partner?
- [42:55]
Dara Khosrowshahi
Yes, their products are excellent. For example, we've used, I think, ChatGPT5.5 for some of the cool stuff that we demoed today in terms of a shopping list or taking pictures, et cetera. 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. Right.
- [43:24]
Nilay Patel
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.
- [43:30]
Dara Khosrowshahi
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 get through this.
- [43:50]
Nilay Patel
Do the model companies feel interchangeable in a way that has always Seemed like a small danger here.
- [43:57]
Dara Khosrowshahi
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. Like 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 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 back end. Interchangeable is too strong a word, but we definitely experiment with various ones and at this point, nothing is hard coded into our systems. And frankly, we're going to make sure that none of them are hard coded into our systems.
- [45:09]
Nilay Patel
Right. That seems like a hedge against the companies and their needs and also cost. Right. The cost of tokens is still quite high.
- [45:16]
Dara Khosrowshahi
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 right now there's a lot of experimentation going on internally.
- [46:03]
Nilay Patel
We have to take another short break. We'll be back in just a minute.
- [46:14]
Host/Announcer
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- [49:12]
Nilay Patel
Welcome back. I'm talking with Dara Khashishawi, 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 I had all these questions about agents and the the big labs coming for you with their consumer chatbots. Maybe that's not happening yet. The thing we did end up talking
- [49:38]
Dara Khosrowshahi
about just as you were walking is
- [49:40]
Nilay Patel
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 codecs.
- [49:51]
Dara Khosrowshahi
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 codecs and they're all really good. And I'd say the big change is with cursor. It was coding encoding 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.
- [50:22]
Nilay Patel
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 where 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. I know what kind of conversation. We're on the cusp of the weirdest org charts in history.
- [51:06]
Dara Khosrowshahi
Yeah. Yeah.
- [51:07]
Nilay Patel
Are you there? Are you saying, okay, agentic coding is going to fundamentally change how you construct a software company?
- [51:14]
Dara Khosrowshahi
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, all the cool stuff is happening as it should. But what we saw is like in sales, right, salespeople now use agents to summarize information on a client that they're going to call to build out 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 bottom 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 1 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 customer, et cetera. That's a policy that's in place, and there are agents that are following those policies, et cetera. So human agents. Human agents. Human agents. 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 and you'll be like, hey, do you remember 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, 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. 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 1 members to be happy, et cetera. I don't want to go bankrupt. So the approach that we're taking now within customer service is throw away the policies, 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, give them feedback, etc.
- [54:17]
Nilay Patel
That's a foundational philosophical question. Why trust computers to make those determinations and not people?
- [54:23]
Dara Khosrowshahi
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.
- [54:41]
Nilay Patel
Okay, so this is a scale answer. It can see all the data. Yeah. So you can just describe a generalized outcome and we'll just.
- [54:47]
Dara Khosrowshahi
And you can retrain based on that data, and you have perfect visibility into the actions, reactions, and the retraining output. You don't have perfect visibility into, but you can kind of iterate around that. So it, 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 gotta 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 customs team to throw everything out. They were frustrated with the results that, 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.
- [55:30]
Nilay Patel
That kind of dynamic customer response.
- [55:33]
Dara Khosrowshahi
Yeah.
- [55:34]
Nilay Patel
In terms of pricing, people are making it illegal in this country to dynamic pricing in that way. Well, because it feels unfair.
- [55:41]
Dara Khosrowshahi
Yeah, we're not going to. 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 1 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.
- [56:19]
Nilay Patel
That's really interesting. It strikes me that 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, it's actually
- [56:29]
Dara Khosrowshahi
the outcomes that you're trying to get at. Yeah, yeah.
- [56:32]
Nilay Patel
That's another. Let's see if it works. You're going to come back next year and I'm going to ask you if it works.
- [56:36]
Dara Khosrowshahi
Yeah, exactly.
- [56:36]
Nilay Patel
But let me ask you just more at the base level. When I think about software companies, generally, the creative tension of any software group is you have a pm, you have a designer, you've got some engineers.
- [56:47]
Host/Announcer
Yeah.
- [56:48]
Nilay Patel
They all want to be in charge. They all think they are going to do and they all need to work together. And if you can get that right, it's magic. It feels like with the power of vibe coding, everyone is going to try to do everyone else's job and no one's going to be good at it. And that is. We're all. It's all a mess. I can see it happening all over the place.
- [57:07]
Dara Khosrowshahi
Sorry. Totally.
- [57:08]
Nilay Patel
Are you rethinking that basic triad inside of your brain?
- [57:12]
Dara Khosrowshahi
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, etc. 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 going to 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 going to change. We're going to try it out, we're going to see what happens.
- [57:56]
Nilay Patel
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 and whatever they're spending cash 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?
- [58:16]
Dara Khosrowshahi
No, we are. My view is if an engineer is going to be 50% or 200% more productive, I want more engineers. The list of ideas in terms of what we want to build so outscales 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, 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 we are budgeting differently. Previously you would have a headcount budget or plan doesn't mean it would actually happen, but as 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 infraspan, which theoretically those overages 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.
- [59:49]
Nilay Patel
Are you all the way at. I'm spending so much on tokens that it's costing me more than Hiring one junior engineer.
- [59:55]
Dara Khosrowshahi
We are spending a lot on tokens. I haven't done the math yet, but it's significant. But the throughput is really accelerating. So at this point, 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.
- [60:16]
Nilay Patel
Well, not the AI question then. I want to talk to you about autonomy, which is also AI, but in a very different way.
- [60:20]
Dara Khosrowshahi
Physical world AI. Yeah.
- [60:21]
Nilay Patel
You were on Diary of a CEO and you said the employees at Uber have created an AI version of DARA to practice presenting and pitching to. Is that real? And how close are we to AI replacing the CEO?
- [60:33]
Dara Khosrowshahi
So it is real. I have not witnessed the Dara AI, but 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?
- [60:46]
Nilay Patel
Decoder listeners, every time we do an AI episode, they say the AI should replace the. The CEO. It is a reflexive comment we get.
- [60:54]
Dara Khosrowshahi
I'm not there yet. I just. I think that 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.
- [61:17]
Nilay Patel
You should recuse yourself from this. You have a deep conflict of interest.
- [61:20]
Dara Khosrowshahi
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.
- [61:26]
Nilay Patel
I mean, that would be in keeping with the Uber story.
- [61:28]
Dara Khosrowshahi
Exactly.
- [61:29]
Nilay Patel
That would be there.
- [61:30]
Dara Khosrowshahi
How is AI changing our board processes? I've got to think about that one.
- [61:33]
Nilay Patel
Oh, trust me, I get those pictures. They're very good. Really? 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 robo taxis. I want to start with Rivian. It's over a billion dollars. I think it's $1.2 billion in total commitment to Rivian over some number of years. I just have a really basic question. You know that's a partnership. In March, you're going to buy up to 50,000 fully autonomous R2 robotaxis by 2031. But it's also called an investment. And I'm just doing the math. I'm like, that's at the price of the R2 platform. You're just buying a bunch of cars. Is buying a bunch of cars and investment or actually getting equity in Rivian?
- [62:10]
Dara Khosrowshahi
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 an Avride, 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 we're confident that they can deliver on those R2s.
- [62:39]
Nilay Patel
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.
- [62:54]
Dara Khosrowshahi
Well, they are very specific. Contrast.
- [62:56]
Nilay Patel
I put this into five different AI systems.
- [62:59]
Dara Khosrowshahi
Fairly fuzzy as far as what, you
- [63:01]
Nilay Patel
know, what are the autonomous milestones?
- [63:04]
Dara Khosrowshahi
I could tell you, but then I'd have to kill you.
- [63:06]
Nilay Patel
The reason I'm asking is not. I mean, I desperately want to know the specifics. I am 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 everyone 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 an Autonomy platform has to hit before I can say, this is a robo taxi.
- [63:34]
Dara Khosrowshahi
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 may be 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. Because ultimately this is about going to market with a product that's proving to be a very, very popular product.
- [64:25]
Nilay Patel
Your big partner in the past was Waymo.
- [64:27]
Dara Khosrowshahi
Yes.
- [64:28]
Nilay Patel
Waymo has gotten there in many cases, to some of the kinds of milestones you're describing, you're obviously different 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.
- [64:44]
Dara Khosrowshahi
Yeah. And a partnership with Neuro and a
- [64:46]
Nilay Patel
partnership with which is the platform there.
- [64:47]
Dara Khosrowshahi
Yes.
- [64:48]
Nilay Patel
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.
- [65:00]
Dara Khosrowshahi
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 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. We ride, for example, or a pony, AI or a Baidu. These are Chinese companies are already at the finish line. 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. Used to be kind of deterministic, 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 model training. And what we're trying to do with AV solutions is we're trying to build out the whole necessary ecosystem 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 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 Avril ride or a We ride. It's, it's a bet that we're making, which is there won't be one physical AI model to rule them all.
- [67:30]
Nilay Patel
There's some real confidence in this bet, you know, over. 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.
- [67:39]
Dara Khosrowshahi
Yeah. Yeah.
- [67:39]
Nilay Patel
The confidence I'm hearing from you is, oh, this is, this is happening. We're, we're, we're spending a lot of money to get there faster.
- [67:45]
Dara Khosrowshahi
All the evidence we see is, is that it's happening. And, and you know, you, you can. Waymo has shown the way. A lot of Waymo engineers now are working in other companies. For example, the Chinese players have shown the way, and you've seen it, the speed of foundation model development, whether it's digital foundation models or physical foundation models, Nvidia is betting on this as well. These are big bets made by capable companies. And we think we're on the right track here.
- [68:18]
Nilay Patel
In the context of our conversation, I'm going to bring up the trade off. Sure. 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 long, long ago, because autonomy was so far away. We just didn't have to solve this problem. You have been on podcast 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 Bartlett.
- [68:47]
Dara Khosrowshahi
Well, if you don't know, you should say it 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 operate in, not just the high cost 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? 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 what I want. So we're building out much more complex use cases for humans to migrate onto 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 I think CEOs should talk about this, not in a way to scare people, 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. 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.
- [70:37]
Nilay Patel
One of my theories about the extremely negative polling on AI is that it's fundamentally an 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 in front of people.
- [70:57]
Dara Khosrowshahi
Not yet.
- [70:58]
Nilay Patel
Yeah, I haven't seen them. Maybe they're coming.
- [71:00]
Dara Khosrowshahi
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.
- [71:14]
Nilay Patel
I don't think that stuff is going to change. The overall polling on this is a threat that will take my job away.
- [71:18]
Dara Khosrowshahi
Listen, if it's your job, I think you're right. Yeah.
- [71:21]
Nilay Patel
And so this dynamic of everybody is showing up saying the jobs are going away and mostly 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?
- [71:41]
Dara Khosrowshahi
So I think that it 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 an impact on consumers at large.
- [72:13]
Nilay Patel
What do you ascribe the extremely negative pulling around AI too?
- [72:19]
Dara Khosrowshahi
I do think that it's some fear mongering from the press. They love the drama. Are you part of the press or no? A little bit.
- [72:29]
Nilay Patel
Can I point if I had this level of influence? You can point at me all you want.
- [72:33]
Dara Khosrowshahi
But listen, it's a conversation that people are constantly having. It's a dramatic conversation. And I do think machines replacing humans has been a theme for eons. Right. 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. I've got 14 year old twin boys and two other older kids. My 14 year old kid is like, dad, why should I study? I'm not gonna be able to have a job like we had. And I was just blown away. My 14 year old is asking me now, maybe he don't wanna study.
- [73:19]
Nilay Patel
This does feel like the main thing. 14 year olds.
- [73:21]
Dara Khosrowshahi
Yeah, exactly. So it's in the ether. You see signal. There are some companies like you mentioned who are acting on it. We'll see 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 make it out to be. And then we'll see, we'll do our best.
- [73:46]
Nilay Patel
I mean, I would love for the press to be real, that it's the press. I just. The media history is not at a moment of intense strength right now. Right. It is contracting.
- [73:56]
Dara Khosrowshahi
You know, there has been some, I do think that the media is incentivized sometimes to over dramatize these things could be real, maybe it's not. I do think that there is a reality in it. The question is how quickly is a change gonna happen and will we be able to, will society be able to adjust fast enough?
- [74:17]
Nilay Patel
Look, I get all my news from X, the Everything app, which assures me on the daily that AGI is just around the corner. I want to ask you the question I ask every time I talk to you. I always take an Uber to come see you. It's just my little tradition. And I always ask the driver, thank you. The drivers always have the same question. So the same question every year. And then this time I actually got a very detailed follow up question. Oh, cool. All right, drivers, I want to know how are they going to get paid more?
- [74:43]
Dara Khosrowshahi
Well, 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. Here in New York city, it's over $50 per utilized hour. So drivers are making decent money. Of course they're going to want to make more money.
- [75:31]
Nilay Patel
They all want to make more money. Do you think autonomy changes that rate?
- [75:39]
Dara Khosrowshahi
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 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.
- [76:09]
Nilay Patel
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 discussion. 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 room.
- [76:37]
Dara Khosrowshahi
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, etc. 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.
- [77:05]
Nilay Patel
The power that the be in this city is Zoran Mandami. Have you met with Zoran Mandami?
- [77:09]
Dara Khosrowshahi
I have seen him speak. I have not met him. One on one yet, but I look forward to that dialogue.
- [77:16]
Nilay Patel
Well, here's my tips. 1. Say you love New York City. He loves it when you say you love New York City.
- [77:19]
Dara Khosrowshahi
Cool. Cool. I do.
- [77:20]
Nilay Patel
2. Tell him the drivers want the return trips to from both the airports and the city.
- [77:24]
Dara Khosrowshahi
I will absolutely relay that to him. Maybe he listens to your podcast. You never know.
- [77:29]
Nilay Patel
We know some people the same thing. I can't tell you. I can't tell you what the milestones are. All right, cool. Dara, this is always a pleasure. Thank you so much for coming.
- [77:36]
Dara Khosrowshahi
Thank you. Really appreciate it.
- [77:39]
Nilay Patel
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 atdecoder the verge.com we really do read all the emails. Or you can hit me up directly on threads or bluesky. We're also on YouTube. You can check out full episodes at Decoder Pod. 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 podcast. Decoder is a production of the Verge and part of the Vox Media Podcast Network show is produced by Kate Cox and Nick Statt. This episode was edited by Xander Adams. Our editorial director is Kevin McShane. The decoder of music is by Breakmaster Cylinder. We'll see you next time.