AI stocks might look frothy, but Uber’s embrace of the technology is transforming its operations and yielding huge financial benefits, CEO Dara Khosrowshahi says.
“You can debate whether or not there’s a bubble in terms of valuation,” Khosrowshahi told the “On with Kara Swisher” podcast in an episode released Thursday. “The spending on the data centers, etc., is massive.”
But AI has created a lot of value for Uber, “not in the space-age stuff” but in “very practical” ways, he said, such as determining what’s shown next to a customer on their Uber Eats app after they select a carton of oat milk.
The latest AI models are “enormously more effective” than previous generations, and are producing “hundreds of millions of dollars of benefit to us,” he added.
Uber’s AI spend “has been well worth it and then some,” he said. “We are not building the picks and shovels but we’re riding on top of that spend, absolutely.”
AI stocks have soared to record highs this year, but investors such as Michael Burry of “The Big Short” have warned tech giants are overspending on microchips and data centers in their scramble for computing power, and will fall short of their fabulous growth forecasts.
How Uber is deploying AI
Khosrowshahi described his mobility, delivery, and freight company as an “applied AI” business. It’s harnessing the tech for everything from setting prices and payments to matching, routing, identification, and dealing with customer complaints, he said.
Roughly 80% to 90% of Uber’s developers now use AI tools, he said. The company no longer has to keep scores of engineers on call to fix issues, and have them spend “hours and hours” figuring out what’s gone wrong and where, as AI agents are now “constantly looking at all of our systems” and helping to diagnose problems, he continued.
“And then the human can look over the shoulder of the AI agent,” he added.
Khosrowshahi said that other tech bosses might see AI making their engineers 20% or 30% more productive, and conclude they need 20% to 30% fewer engineers, but that’s not his attitude.
“I just think they become superhumans,” he said. “So we are actually hiring more engineers because every engineer got more valuable to me.”
Khosrowshahi also touched on Uber’s partnership with Waymo and other robotaxi companies, saying the driverless vehicles are proving popular.
“There’s something to be said for privacy,” he said. While he loves talking to Uber drivers and hearing their stories, it’s also “nice being alone in the car.”
Khosrowshahi predicted that once self-driving cars become proven revenue generators, Wall Street will embrace them as investments and want their cars on Uber’s platform to access its customers and maximize their returns.
Similar to how private equity and private debt companies are “financing these data centers and buying Nvidia chips, that same ecosystem is going to be buying fleets of cars,” he said.
Khosrowshahi said that Uber could play a similar role to Marriott, which primarily manages or franchises hotels instead of owning them.
