Uber's busiest week: 320 million trips, and AI agents booked four of the rides

For two years the pitch has been the same. Soon you won't open apps. You'll tell your assistant what you want, and an AI agent will go off and book the car, order the food, sort the flights. Every big lab has an agent product. Every big app company has been told to get ready.

Uber got ready. Then, on its third-quarter earnings call on Wednesday, November 4, it read out the numbers.

"We had one of our largest weeks last week because it was Halloween," chief financial officer Balaji Krishnamurthy told analysts, as quoted by Thurrott. That week Uber and Uber Eats handled around 320 million trips and orders, according to TechCrunch. AI agents placed about 500 of the Uber Eats orders. Then Krishnamurthy got to rides. "And for our Rides business, it was a grand total of 4 trips that we have fulfilled from agents."

Four.

Doing the maths

Add the rides and the food orders together and agents handled roughly 504 transactions out of about 320 million. That is around one in every 635,000. Halloween week was one of the busiest of the year, which is exactly when you would expect a convenience feature to get used, if people wanted it.

Uber has not made this hard. Thurrott and OfficeChai report that the company offers two ways in for agents. One is a Voice Booking Agent built into the Uber app. The other is the Uber Rides MCP connector, which lets any outside AI assistant book a ride, including ones living in smart glasses, watches and earbuds. MCP is the Model Context Protocol, the plumbing the industry adopted precisely so that agents could reach services like this. The pipe exists. Hardly anything is coming down it.

Chief executive Dara Khosrowshahi did not pretend otherwise. "It is very, very early and very limited traction that we are seeing so far," he said, according to TechCrunch.

He also offered the most likely reason. The average time to book a ride in the Uber app is 50 seconds, he said. Reordering a favourite meal on Uber Eats takes about 90 seconds. Those are small numbers. An agent saves time when a task is long, boring and full of forms. Calling a car is none of those things. You open the app, the pickup point is already set to where you are standing, you tap. Asking a chatbot to do the same thing means explaining where you are, where you are going, and which car you want, then trusting it got all of that right.

The food number is higher for a reason that fits the same logic. Ordering dinner has more choices in it, more browsing, more of the kind of fiddly decision-making an assistant can plausibly take off your hands. Five hundred orders is still nothing at Uber's scale, but it is about 125 times better than rides.

Everyone wants a piece of a market that isn't there yet

Uber is not alone in finding this out. All three outlets note that DoorDash said on its own third-quarter call that it had seen "several hundred" orders from third-party AI agents. Two of the biggest consumer apps in the country, with hundreds of millions of transactions a month between them, and agent traffic that disappears into the rounding.

That has not stopped the AI companies from lining up. "Every single AI system company is talking to us," Khosrowshahi said, as quoted by TechCrunch. He counted around eight major AI assistants on the market today and said he expects more than ten over time. TechCrunch lists some of the ones with agent products: OpenAI, Anthropic, Google, SpaceXAI's Grok, and Meta's Muse, which TechCrunch says has more than ten million users.

Khosrowshahi's framing was polite but pointed. "We think our direct services are going to be the most delightful and easy, but we will work with third parties," he said, according to Thurrott. He added that Uber would not depend on any one player.

Read that as a company protecting its front door. If agents ever do become the way people book rides, the assistant owns the customer, and Uber becomes a fulfilment service bidding against Lyft inside someone else's interface. Uber's best outcome is a world where agents bring in a bit of extra demand while people keep opening the Uber app. Khosrowshahi said as much: "We think it will be a net positive in terms of demand on the ecosystem."

Thurrott points to the next test. Apple's new Siri, now in developer beta with iOS 27.3, may be able to act inside apps through App Intents. An assistant built into the phone, that already knows where you are and can tap the buttons for you, has a better chance than a chatbot in a browser tab. If agent bookings stay this low once that ships, the problem is people's habits, and better plumbing will not fix it.

For now, the busiest week of Uber's quarter produced four rides booked by software acting on a human's behalf. At most four people decided that talking to a bot was easier than tapping a button.

Sources: TechCrunch, Thurrott, OfficeChai.