Uber’s product chief on hotels, robotaxis, and why the company doesn’t want to be “everything for everyone”

Over the past year, Uber has quietly moved beyond the two companies most people associate it with. You can also do ride-hailing and delivery, but if you spend some time in the app you’ll now find hotel bookings powered by Expedia, ‘shop for me’ concierge features, and boat rentals in Europe.

There’s a lot going on under the hood, so to speak. Think debit cards for drivers, a side job tagging data for those same earners looking to make more money, and a six-month-old business unit called AV Labs, which is developing a fleet of sensor-equipped vehicles separate from Uber’s regular driver network and designed to collect ever-increasing amounts of driving data. Uber sees the initiative as a way to strengthen relationships with autonomous vehicle partners, several of which also have stakes in it, but it also certainly looks like a hedge. Uber competes directly with some of those same partners, including Waymo chief, and owning the data layer gives Uber both some influence and capabilities.

Whether Uber will become a full-fledged ‘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 ambitions in financial services, its increasingly complicated relationship with Waymo, its new AV Labs data operation, and how AI is starting to emerge in ways that passengers and drivers will actually notice.

This interview has been edited for length and clarity.

TC: You unveiled hotels, boat rentals and more retail features earlier this year. How did that list come about, and what did not make the selection?

SK: Every year our teams obviously build a lot of things, and some of that we think is worth sharing with the world on the biggest stage. This year the theme we focused on was real travel. Every year, 1.5 billion trips on the Uber platform take place outside a user’s home. So we know that traveling is a common use case for Uber users. Our biggest announcement this time was actually the introduction of hotels on Uber as a partnership with Expedia. But traveling is so much more than that: you need rides to get from the airport to the hotel, and you need food. We heard from many of our users that many of them were no longer using room service and were only using the Uber Eats app. With Shop for Me, the goal was to allow you to shop at any local store, even if that store doesn’t have its entire catalog available on Uber Eats. Travel, in my opinion, is really the third part of the stool: we had rides, then we added food, and now we’re adding travel.

Is Uber on its way to offering its own financial services, as “everything apps” are doing in Asia?

For us, financial services cover several different entities: consumers, but also drivers, couriers and sellers. Today we have several products mainly aimed at drivers and couriers, where we have the so-called Uber Pro card, which they can use as a payment card and transfer all their earnings. We are currently starting to experiment with some of these products for merchants in certain parts of the world. On the consumer side, we’ll see if that makes sense for us in the long run. Right now there is a payment method that consumers can use – we call this Uber credits – and this is related to our membership program. For example, at hotels, members get 10% cash back on a $1,000 transaction, which is $100 back in credit that you can then use for rides and dinners.

Would Uber ever offer its own buy now, pay later product?

I’m not sure, because we want to make sure the experts do what the experts do. We’ve already announced partnerships with others in the industry who already offer this service, so you’ll have the option to do so at checkout. In terms of our overall product strategy, we don’t try to be all things to all people.

For boat rentals in Europe, tapping the tab takes users to a partner’s own booking flow instead of checking out with Uber. Is that transfer model a template for what is to come?

There are certainly some cases where, especially when we do something new, we have to rely on our partners, because a two-way integration just takes a lot of time, and in some cases it is good for us to try it before we integrate deeply. In the case of Expedia, we decided that it made sense to integrate deeply: we built the entire user interface ourselves in collaboration with Expedia. But in some cases it may make sense to hand the rest of the experience to the experts in that field, and if you get a lot of traction, we can always integrate them deeply.

Your Uber One membership product now has 51 million members and accounts for about half of bookings. Do you have data showing that the cross-sell really works: that a delivery person will make more trips later?

On the delivery side, it will take you two to three orders before you break even on the monthly amount you pay. As members become more accustomed to the program, its frequency will increase within the industry they already use. And it also leads to more use of the other sides of the business: we see that people who are mobile are only starting to use delivery, and people who are only doing delivery are also starting to use mobility.

Delivery is one of the most difficult sectors in the technology sector to make profitable. Does Uber Eats still rely on taxi drivers to stay healthy?

During Uber Eats’ early years, it was not yet profitable, but in recent quarters, Uber Eats itself has been a profitable business for us, generating a lot of profit.

A story I wrote this spring presented Uber as an unexpectedly more direct competitor to Airbnb, which now offers airport transfers through a partner. Do you see it this way? Who are You most focused on?

There is no shortage of competitors: Lyft in the US, Didi and 99 in Latin America, Bolt, Ola around the world, and in delivery DoorDash, Delivery Hero. But I only spend a very small percentage of my time thinking about that. Most of my time, or what keeps me up at night, is providing all the value we can to our users.

You recently ended the Waymo pilot in Phoenix while scaling elsewhere. How do you keep the experience coherent when you’re working 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 our scale launches were in Austin and Atlanta, where we have hundreds of cars with them. When we recently looked at the Phoenix pilot, we collectively decided that there was no point in continuing. Waymo is an excellent partner of ours, but also a competitor in many cities. We are not in the race to become an L4 autonomy provider; what we’re focusing on is building the race tracks so we can work with multiple players. We believe in the hybrid network, both human drivers and autonomous vehicles in the same city, because it allows us to balance supply and demand.

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

We will equip hundreds of cars with sensors, deployed through our fleet partners, and in doing so we will collect millions of kilometers of driving data. That really helps with the long-tail problem: you want to see all edge cases, not just the P95, P99 level. Beyond the data itself, there is so much knowledge from our 10 million earners about how pick-up and drop-off works. We process 25 million lost items every year – how do you deal with that operationally in the world of autonomy? That’s the kind of operational expertise we can bring to the table.

Does Uber sell driver and passenger data to Gen AI companies?

I would divide this into two parts. In terms of Gen AI companies, we can label data for them using our earner base, or through audio collection, and yes, we have commercial relationships with them and we sell it to them – that’s a part of the business that’s new, and we’re extremely bullish on it. AV Labs is a separate company, and we’re still figuring out models for sharing that data with partners. It’s a little early.

Do drivers record conversations with passengers for these dates?

No, no, no – I want to be very clear: no conversation will be recorded while they are in transit. When they’re not traveling, they’re not driving, delivering, just talking, or listening to some audio and transcribing it. By the way, they get paid for it.

Where has AI actually appeared in a way that a rider or driver would notice?

If you are an earner on our platform, we have an Earner Assistant. The main question on their mind is, how do I make more money, and it says, look, it’s actually pretty bright in the South Bay, but you might want to go five miles away where there’s a lot of demand. On the Eats side, there’s a shopping cart assistant where you can say, “I want milk, eggs, bread” and the cart will be created very quickly. And with rides, you can use your voice to request a ride. For example, say, “I’m looking for a ride to the airport, I have six pieces of luggage, six people.”

So a fully agentic Uber – “plan and book my entire trip” – is in the offing?

I can’t put a date on it, and I can’t tell you exactly what the feature set will be, but I think AI will be a big contributor to that, where I can leave the complexity to the platform and just tell an agent what exactly I want. Easier said than done: we want to make sure we’re not just checking a box by sending an agent who might not work so well.

As a CPO, how can you personally prioritize when there are so many ideas in the pipeline?

I would say I spend 70% to 80% of my time making sure our existing products, or the products we’re about to launch, are as solid as possible. All new ideas are like shiny objects: if you have a hundred ideas, maybe five are good ones, and those five need a lot of cultivation and persuasion. So probably 20% of the time is about new ideas – and by the way, I’m going to drive and deliver myself, just to see our product from the other side with my own eyes.