Halloween is one of the busiest weeks of the year for Uber, both in terms of the number of trips recorded and the number of food delivery orders recorded on those dates. Just days after this peak of overwork, the company told its investors how much of that rush was caused by a trendy technology: AI agents.
Technology that’s being marketed as the next way to buy almost anything, Halloween proved to be more of a trick than a treat.
Four trips and 500 orders. In presenting third-quarter results to shareholders, Uber’s chief financial officer, Balaji Krishnamurthy, detailed that the company moved about 320 million operations last Halloween. This figure includes Uber trips and Uber Eats orders. About 500 of these food orders came through AI agents who placed food orders on behalf of their users. However, this number drops when it comes to requests for a ride home, where agents booked just four rides.
According to what he said The VergeIt’s the first time that Uber has broken the number of orders coming from AI agents, and it did so in a particularly good quarter where trips and orders generated 4.1 billion trips and $59.8 billion in gross bookings. A week ago, the CEO of delivery company DoorDash, Tony Xu, admitted that third-party agents have generated hundreds of orders, not every week, but for as long as they’ve existed.
Much ado about nothing. Muse, Meta’s personal agent, was launched on September 8. In just one week it was already the most downloaded free app on the App Store in the US. Meta claims that it has more than 10 million users and many people use it to buy.
Instinct, another personal agent startup, closed its latest round at a $10 billion valuation. Faced with the enthusiasm that sells these agents as guaranteed shopping assistants, the records of Uber and DoorDash tell a different story: all these millions of users, at the moment, do not dare to leave their purchases in the hands of these agents and, therefore, they do not become orders.
Ordering dinner is now easy. Uber CEO Dara Khosrowshahi gave a clue as to why this is happening. It takes an average of 50 seconds for a user to book a trip on the Uber app. The same thing happens when you repeat a favorite order on Uber Eats. In that case it takes about 90 seconds. At this point, letting an AI agent do it for you rarely saves time or, in fact, may take longer to explain to the agent than doing it directly.
Another thing is procedures that no one wants to do. Canceling subscriptions or struggling with administrative management can save you hours and an agent there would make more sense. Also, for example, to find offers for a specific product or to compare them.
A sleeping giant. At the moment the use of AI agents on the balance sheets of large sales platforms is almost anecdotal suggesting that agents will remain in that situation forever. Uber is open to collaborating with AI companies, but its biggest asset continues to be a user-friendly experience in its app that it’s not fair to ask for an agent.
Another closed the front door. Amazon has blocked Muse for security reasons, and an agent can’t see ads, offers or product “hooks” that lead to compulsive purchases and depend on the company’s profits.
In Xataka | Instinct and Muse wanted to take care of our shopping, but they ran into an unexpected obstacle: stores have doors
Picture | Unsplash (Robert Annash)
