Uber’s Chief Product Officer on Travel, AI Agents, and Playing Both Sides of the Robotaxi Race

**Connie Loizos** (0:01)
Hi, I'm Connie Loizos.

**Alex Gove** (0:03)
And this is Alex Gove.

**Connie Loizos** (0:04)
And this is Strictly VC Download.
Uber is on an absolute tear right now. In the last few months alone, the company has announced hotel booking through a new partnership with Expedia, boat rentals in Europe, a feature called Shop For Me that lets you order from literally any local store, and it's layering AI on top of almost every corner of the app, voicebooked rides, an AI grocery cart, an assistant that tells its 10 million drivers and couriers where to find more trips.
This is a company that started as a button to hail a car and increasingly looks like it wants to be the app you open for basically anything involving movement, money or a destination. For this week's Strictly VC Download, I sat down with Sachin Kansal, Uber's chief product officer to talk about all of it, the travel push, the company's sprawling bet on autonomous vehicles and where AI fits into a business that's now touching food, rides, hotels, and increasingly everything in between. I'll say up front, I enjoyed this conversation, but it left me with more questions than an answer. Uber is standing up something called AV Labs, equipping cars with sensors to collect driving data that it can hand off to autonomy partners. I came away from the conversation still not entirely clear on why, or what makes that data valuable when companies like Waymo have been at this for years with fleets of their own. I suspect it's to give Uber some options down the line, but when I pushed Kansal on the point of AV Labs, I don't think I got a fully satisfying answer. We also got into the ways Uber is giving its earners new ways to make money beyond driving and delivering, including recording audio and video that Uber sells to generative AI companies for training data. When I asked exactly what's being recorded, the answer raised again, more questions than it settled. Though Kansal was emphatic that recording riders during actual trips is explicitly not part of it, which is seemingly the most important thing to note. He also shared that 51 million people now pay for Uber One, Uber's membership program, and that together they account for roughly half the company's total bookings, which tells you just how central this subscription flywheel has become to everything else we talked about. What you're left with listening to this is a fast moving look at a company that has no intention of standing still while the ground shifts underneath it. A world that may increasingly belong to autonomous vehicles and the companies that build them. You can almost picture a future where Uber isn't really thought of as a ride sharing company at all. If it gets that far.
We had a great time with this one. We hope you do too. And we'll see you back here next week.
Well, Sachin, really great to be connecting with you. It was nice to see you a little bit earlier this year at a dinner. I think that was just before you guys had a very big event where you unveiled a whole lot of really interesting things that I want to kind of talk about today, including boat rentals in Europe, a shop for me feature, new travel mode inside the app. Can you walk me through how that shortlist got made and maybe also what else was in the mix that didn't make the cut this year?

**Sachin Kansal** (3:26)
Yeah, Connie, first of all, thanks for having me. Now, I would love to talk about how we came up with that list. Look, every year our teams are obviously building a lot of stuff and a subset of that, we decide is what sort of sharing with the world on the biggest stage. We do one large consumer event every year and of course, there are other announcements that happen throughout the year. What we try to do in the announcement is, rather than having a bunch of disparate announcements, we try to focus on a theme because we want users to take away some sort of new thing that they feel Uber can deliver for them.
This year, the theme that we gravitated towards was really travel. Uber is not a stranger to travel. A lot of people, when they travel, Uber is the first app that they open. 1.5 billion trips on the Uber platform every year actually happen outside of a user's home city. So we know that travel is something that's a very common use case for Uber users.
So our headline announcement this time was actually, Introducing Hotels on Uber as a partnership with Expedia, because hotels is something, is the first thing that someone thinks about when they think of their destination, their vacation, whether it's a business trip or whether it's a personal trip. So we enable that on the Uber platform. But then travel is so much more than that. For example, when you are traveling, when you are at a hotel, whether you booked it through Uber or not, you need rides to go from the airport to the hotel and also for local transportation. After that, but then you need food. We heard from a lot of our users that a lot of them had stopped using room service in certain situations, and they were just using the Uber Eats app. We thought that we can do a lot more to enable that by making it very easy inside Uber Eats for someone to basically order anything they wanted. Then when it comes to local shopping, the goal with that was for us to enable you to shop from any local store, even if that store is not available on Uber Eats, let's say someone wants to order a plant from a local plant shop, we should be able to send a shopper with the right kind of description and be able to pick up that order for the user and deliver to them.