AI shopping agents are supposed to be the next big way to buy things. Uber just gave a reality check: during its busiest week of October, only four people used an AI agent to book a ride.
The figures came from Uber’s third-quarter earnings call on Wednesday, as reported by TechCrunch. The week in question was the week of Halloween.
The Numbers
Uber’s chief financial officer, Balaji Krishnamurthy, said the company handled about 320 million trips and orders across Uber and Uber Eats that week. Only 500 of them were Uber Eats orders placed by an AI agent. Ride bookings through agents totaled four.
That works out to roughly 0.0002% of the total for food orders, and effectively zero for rides. Food delivery did better than rides, but the volume was, in TechCrunch’s words, still fairly small.
What Uber’s CEO Said
CEO Dara Khosrowshahi called it “very, very early and very limited traction.” He added, “Listen, we hope that there will be more traction.”
He also made a practical point: booking in the Uber app takes an average of about 50 seconds, and reordering a favorite meal takes about 90 seconds. When the app is already that quick, an agent has little time left to save.
Khosrowshahi still sees upside. He said agents are another way to reach Uber’s platform and should be a net positive for demand. About eight major AI assistants are on the market, he said, with more than 10 expected, and “every single AI system company is talking to us.”
Uber Isn’t Alone
TechCrunch noted that DoorDash recently said it had received only a few hundred orders from AI agents. Two big delivery platforms reporting tiny numbers suggests that, for now, agent-driven ordering is more experiment than habit.
Why It Matters
Banks are already worried about what agents might do on a customer’s behalf. We covered how Schwab and JPMorgan are blocking outside AI agents from logging in to accounts. Retailers face the opposite question: whether to welcome agents as a new sales channel.
For shoppers, the takeaway is simple. Heavy marketing doesn’t mean heavy use. If an agent can’t beat 50 seconds in an app, most people will keep tapping the app.
The Catch
These are single-week numbers reported by the company on an earnings call, and the ratios here are our own arithmetic from them. They say nothing about how agent use may grow over the next year. Uber’s own CEO described the data as early.
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