Uber’s product chief on hotels, robo-taxis, and why the company doesn’t want to be ‘everything to everyone’

Uber has spent the past year quietly overtaking the two businesses most people associate with it. There are ride-hailing services, of course, and delivery, but spend some time in the app and you’ll now find Expedia-powered hotel bookings, “shop for me” concierge features, and European boat rentals.

Under the hood, so to speak, there’s also a lot going on. Think debit cards for drivers, a data label side hustle for those same earners looking to make more money, and a six-month-old business unit called AV Labswhich is developing a fleet of sensor-equipped vehicles separate from Uber’s regular network of drivers and designed to collect larger amounts of driving data. Uber is positioning this initiative as a way to strengthen its relationships with self-driving car partners, many of which it also owns shares of, but it certainly seems like a hedge as well. Uber competes directly with some of those same partners, including Waymo, and owning the data layer gives Uber some leverage and discretion.

Whether Uber will become a “one-stop-shop app” in the style of some Asian super apps like Grab remains an open question. But in this conversation, Sachin Kansal, Uber’s chief product officer, walks TechCrunch through the company’s ambitions in financial services, which are becoming increasingly important. A complex relationship With Waymo, AV Labs’ new data run, and how AI is starting to emerge in ways that riders and drivers will actually notice.

This interview has been edited for length and clarity.

TC: You unveiled hotels, boat rentals, and more shopping features earlier this year. How was that list prepared, and what was not cut?

SK: Obviously every year our teams build a lot of stuff, and a subset of what we decide is worth sharing with the world on the biggest stage. The theme we were really drawn to this year was travel. Already 1.5 billion trips are made on the Uber platform each year outside of a user’s home city, so we know that travel is a very popular use case for Uber users. Our major announcement this time was offering hotels on Uber as a partnership with Expedia. But traveling is much more than that, you need transportation to get from the airport to the hotel, and you need food. We’ve heard from a lot of our users that many of them have stopped using room service and are only using Uber Eats. With Shop for Me, the goal was to enable you to shop from any local store even if that store isn’t available on Uber Eats with the entire catalog. Travel is really, in my opinion, the third leg of the stool – we had trips, then we added meals, and now we’re adding travel.

Is Uber moving towards offering its own financial services, similar to what All Apps is doing in Asia?

Financial services for us involve several different entities – consumers, but also drivers, couriers and merchants. We have a lot of products today that are mostly focused on drivers and couriers, where we have what we call the Uber Pro Card, which they can use as a debit card and transfer all their earnings to. We are now starting to trial some of these products for merchants in certain parts of the world. As far as consumers are concerned, we’ll see if that makes sense for us in the long term. There is currently a currency that consumers can use – we call it “Uber Credits” – and this is linked to our membership program. At hotels, for example, members get 10% cash back on a $1,000 transaction, which is $100 in credit that you can then use on trips and dining.

Will Uber offer its own “buy now, pay later” product?

I’m not sure, because we want to make sure that experts do what experts do. We’ve already announced partnerships with others in the industry that already offer this service, so you have the ability to do this at checkout. In terms of our overall product strategy, we’re not trying to be everything to everyone.

With boat rentals, in Europe, clicking on a tab directs users to the partner’s booking flow rather than checking out within Uber. Is this delivery model a model of what’s to come?

Of course there are some cases, especially when we do something new, where we depend on our partners, because two-way integration takes a lot of time, and in some cases it is good for us to try before we integrate too deeply. In the case of Expedia, we decided it made sense to integrate deeply — we built the entire user interface on our own in partnership with Expedia. But in some cases it may make sense for us to hand over the rest of the expertise to experts in the field, and if it gets significant traction, we can always integrate them deeply.

Your Uber One membership product now has 51 million members and accounts for nearly half of bookings. Do you have data showing that cross-selling actually works – and that the delivery user subsequently starts getting more rides?

On the delivery side, it takes two or three orders to be able to break even on the monthly fees you pay. As members become more familiar with the software, it increases their frequency within the business area they already use. This is also leading to increased use of other aspects of the business – we’re seeing people who are just commuting also starting to use ride-hailing, and people who are delivering are also starting to use commuting.

Delivery has been one of the hardest businesses in technology to turn a profit. Does Uber Eats still rely on ride-hailing services to stay healthy?

During the early years of Uber Eats, Uber Eats was not yet profitable, but over the past few quarters, Uber Eats has become an independently profitable business for us, generating a lot of profits.

A story I wrote This spring Uber has unexpectedly positioned itself as competing more directly with Airbnb, which now offers airport transportation through a partner. Do you see it this way? Who are they? You Most focused on?

There’s no dearth of competitors – Lyft in the US, Didi and 99 in Latin America, Bolt and Ola around the world, and on delivery, DoorDash and Different Hero. But I spend a very small percentage of my time thinking about that. The largest percentage of my time, or what keeps me up at night, is that we provide our users with all the value we can.

You recently injury Waymo pilot in Phoenix while expanding elsewhere. How do you keep the experience cohesive when you’re partnering with, and in some cities competing with, the same supplier?

Phoenix was the first city we launched with Waymo, with about a dozen cars, but the large-scale launches have been in Austin and Atlanta, where we have hundreds of cars with them. When we recently looked at the Phoenix pilot, we mutually decided it didn’t make sense for us to continue. Waymo is an excellent partner of ours, but also a competitor in many cities. We’re not in the race to be a level 4 autonomy provider – what we’re focused on is setting up racetracks so we can work with multiple players. We believe in the hybrid network, human drivers as well as autonomous vehicles in the same city, because it allows us to balance demand and supply.

Regarding AV Labs, what can Uber offer autonomous partners that they don’t already have?

We will equip hundreds of cars with sensors, deploy them through our fleet partners, and through this we will collect millions of miles of driving data. This really helps with the long tail problem – you want to see all the edge cases, not just the P95 and P99 level. Beyond the data itself, there’s a lot more knowledge our 10 million employers have regarding how pickup and delivery operations work. We deal with 25 million lost items every year – how do you deal with that practically in the world of independence? This is the type of operational expertise we can provide.

Is Uber selling driver and passenger data to next-generation AI companies?

I would like to divide this into two parts. In terms of Gen AI companies, we’re able to disaggregate data for them using our revenue base, or through audio collection, and yes, we have business relationships with them and sell to them — that’s part of the new business, and we’re very bullish on it. AV Labs is separate, and we’re still working on those models to share that data with partners. It’s a little early.

Do drivers record conversations with passengers to use this data?

No, no, no – I want to be very clear, there is no conversation being recorded as part of this while they are on the flight. When they’re not on a trip, they’re not driving, they’re not delivering, they’re just talking, or listening to an audio clip and transcribing it. By the way, they get paid to do this.

Where has AI already emerged in ways that a passenger or driver might notice?

If you’re an earner on our platform, we have an earning assistant – the first question on their mind is how can I make more money, and they’ll say, look, it’s actually pretty light in the South Bay, but you might want to go five miles where there’s a lot of demand. On the dining side, there’s a grocery cart assistant where you can say “I want milk, eggs, and bread” and it creates the cart very quickly. And on flights, you can use voice to request a ride – say “I’m looking for a ride to the airport, I have six pieces of luggage, for six people.”

So, is the full Uber service – “plan and book my entire trip” on the horizon?

I can’t put a date on that, and I can’t tell you exactly what the feature set will be, but I think AI will be a big enabler of that, where I can leave the complexity to the platform and tell the agent exactly what I want. Easier said than done – we want to make sure we’re not just checking the box by charging a dealer that may not be doing well.

As a CTO, how do you personally prioritize with so many ideas in the pipeline?

I would say I spend 70% to 80% of my time making sure that our current products, or products that we’re about to launch, are as robust as possible. All new ideas are like shiny objects – if you have 100 ideas, maybe five of them will be good, and those five need a lot of polishing and conviction. So, maybe 20% of the time is dedicated to new ideas — including, by the way, getting out and driving and dropping myself off, just to see our product right from the other side.