Uber's product chief on hotels, robotaxis, and why the company doesn't want to be "everything for everyone"
Uber Chief Product Officer Sachin Kansal walks TechCrunch through the company's financial-services ambitions, its increasingly complicated relationship with Waymo, its new AV Labs data operation, and how AI is starting to show up in ways riders and drivers will actually notice. Uber has spent the last year quietly pushing beyond the two businesses most people associate it with. There's ride-hailing, of course, and delivery, but spend time in the app and you'll now find hotel bookings powered by Expedia, "shop for me" concierge features, and boat rentals in Europe.
Key Takeaways
- Under the hood, so to speak, there's also a lot happening.
- This interview has been edited for length and clarity.
TC: You unveiled hotels, boat rentals, and more shopping features earlier this year.
- Our headline announcement this time was actually introducing hotels on Uber as a partnership with Expedia.
But travel is so much more than that - you need rides to go from the airport to the hotel, and you need food.
- Financial services for us cuts across multiple different entities - consumers, but also drivers and couriers, and merchants.
We have multiple products today focused mostly 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 onto.
- I'm not sure, because we want to make sure that the experts do what the experts do.
Stats & Key Facts
- #5 billion trips on the Uber platform every year actually happen outside of a user's home city, so we know that travel is something that's a very common use case for Uber users.
- #On hotels, for example, members get 10% cash back on a $1,000 transaction, that's $100 back as credit that you can then use on rides and eats.
Under the hood, so to speak, there's also a lot happening. Think debit cards for drivers, a data-labeling side hustle for these same earners looking to make more moolah, and a six-month-old, business unit called AV Labs , which is developing a fleet of sensor-equipped vehicles that's separate from Uber's regular driver network and designed to gather ever-larger amounts of driving data. Uber frames the initiative as a way to strengthen its relationships with autonomous vehicle partners, several of which it also holds equity in, but it sure looks like a hedge, as well.
Uber competes directly with some of those same partners, with Waymo chief among them, and owning the data layer gives Uber both some leverage and optionality. Whether Uber becomes a full-blown "everything app" similar to some Asian super-apps like Grab, remains an open question. But in this conversation, Uber Chief Product Officer Sachin Kansal walks TechCrunch through the company's financial-services ambitions, its increasingly complicated relationship with Waymo, its new AV Labs data operation, and how AI is starting to show up in ways riders and drivers will actually notice.
SK: Every year our teams are obviously building a lot of stuff, and a subset of that we decide is worth sharing with the world on the biggest stage. This year the theme that we gravitated towards was really travel. 5 billion trips on the Uber platform every year actually happen outside of a user's home city, so we know that travel is something that's a very common use case for Uber users.
For more details please read the original article at TechCrunch AI.
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