Over the past year Uber has quietly broadened the services available in its app beyond the two businesses most people associate with the company: ride-hailing and delivery. The app now includes hotel bookings via a partnership with Expedia, a “shop for me” concierge feature, and boat rentals in Europe.
Why travel and what was launched
Sachin Kansal, Uber’s Chief Product Officer, says the company focused on travel in its recent product announcements because roughly 1.5 billion trips on the Uber platform each year occur outside a user’s home city. The headline introduction was hotels on Uber, built in partnership with Expedia. Uber One members receive benefits—for example, members get 10% cash back on hotel purchases so a $1,000 transaction yields $100 in Uber credits that can be used for rides or Eats.
Kansal frames travel as the platform’s "third leg": Uber began with rides, added Eats, and is now expanding travel-related services.
Financial services experiments
Uber is exploring financial products across several customer groups: consumers, drivers and couriers, and merchants. Some products already target drivers and couriers—such as the Uber Pro card, a debit-style product onto which drivers can transfer their earnings. Uber is testing similar offerings for merchants in select markets.
On the consumer side the company has not committed to offering every type of financial product itself. Kansal said Uber prefers to partner with specialists for services like buy now, pay later, making such options available at checkout through third parties rather than building them in-house.
Uber One currently has 51 million members and accounts for roughly half of bookings, and Kansal said membership tends to increase usage within a given line of business and also encourages cross-use between mobility and delivery.
AV Labs and collecting driving data
AV Labs, founded about six months ago, is a separate Uber business unit focused on deploying sensor-equipped vehicles through fleet partners to collect driving data at scale. The plan is to outfit hundreds of cars and gather "millions of miles" of driving data to capture the long-tail of edge cases beyond the common scenarios.
Kansal argues Uber brings operational know-how from its roughly 10 million earners—examples include how pickups and drop-offs work in practice and the operational handling of 25 million lost items the company processes each year—expertise that could be useful to autonomy partners.
Relationship with Waymo and other autonomy partners
Uber’s relationship with Waymo is both cooperative and competitive. The initial Waymo pilot in Phoenix involved about a dozen cars and was recently wound down by mutual agreement; larger-scale launches have taken place in Austin and Atlanta, where hundreds of Waymo vehicles operated. Kansal emphasized Uber’s goal is not to become an L4 autonomy provider itself but to provide infrastructure and a platform that can work with multiple autonomous developers and support a hybrid network of human drivers and autonomous vehicles.
Selling labeled data to AI companies
Uber has begun selling labeled data and related services to generative AI companies. The business involves using the earner base for data-labeling work and audio collection, and Kansal confirmed commercial relationships exist around these services. He was explicit that this labeling work does not involve recording rider-driver conversations during trips: earners perform transcription or labeling when they are not on trips and are paid for those tasks.
AV Labs’ own sensor data-sharing models with partners are still being developed and it is too early to describe how that data will be shared or monetized in detail.
Where AI already helps users and earners
Kansal identified a few concrete examples of AI-driven features riders and earners can already notice: an earner assistant that suggests where drivers should reposition to earn more; a grocery cart assistant on Eats that turns a short list like "milk, eggs, bread" into a populated shopping cart; and voice-based ride requests that include details such as luggage and passenger count.
He acknowledged that a fully autonomous agent that plans and books entire trips is plausible in the future, but Uber is cautious about shipping such an agent until it works well in practice.
Product priorities
As Chief Product Officer Kansal says he spends roughly 70–80% of his time ensuring existing or soon-to-launch products are stable and high quality. The remainder is spent evaluating new ideas; of many potential concepts, only a small fraction are chosen for deeper investment. Kansal also noted he sometimes drives and delivers himself to experience the product firsthand.
Takeaway
Uber is broadening its role from a two-product company to a multi-service platform: integrating travel bookings, experimenting with financial offerings for earners and merchants, selling labeled data to AI companies, and operating AV Labs to collect driving data. These moves are presented as ways to deepen partnerships with autonomy developers and to increase cross-selling across Uber’s mobility, delivery and travel businesses.
Key figures and facts cited in the interview: about 1.5 billion trips per year outside users’ home cities; Uber One has 51 million members; Uber has about 10 million earners; the company handles 25 million lost items per year; AV Labs was formed roughly six months ago.
