Uber’s Product Chief on Hotels, Robotaxis, and Not Being Everything for Everyone
Uber is quietly pushing beyond ride-hailing and delivery, adding hotel bookings via Expedia, boat rentals, and a ‘shop for me’ concierge feature. But the company’s real tension is managing its complicated relationship with autonomous vehicle partners like Waymo—partner in some cities, competitor in others. Uber‘s newly established AV Labs equips hundreds of fleet cars with sensors to collect millions of miles of driving data, giving the company leverage and optionality even as it competes with the same partners it holds equity in. The company insists it is not racing to become an L4 autonomy provider, but rather laying down ‘race tracks’ for multiple players.
On the product side, Uber is integrating deeply with Expedia for hotels, while using a lighter handoff model for boat rentals to test before committing to deeper integration. The Uber One membership, now with 51 million members, drives cross-use between mobility and delivery, and the company has made Uber Eats independently profitable. For AI, Uber offers data labeling services to Gen AI companies using its earner base, and is rolling out features like an earner assistant that suggests where to drive, a grocery cart assistant, and voice ride requests. But CPO Sachin Kansal is careful not to ship a half-baked agent, spending 70-80% of his time on existing products and personally driving and delivering to understand the frontline experience.
For builders, the takeaway is that Uber‘s strategy is not to be an ‘everything app’ in the Asian super-app mold, but to use selective, deep partnerships and operational expertise as competitive moats. The company’s data collection through AV Labs and its ability to handle edge cases like 25 million lost items annually give it a unique position in the autonomy ecosystem. Uber is betting that the hybrid network of human drivers and autonomous vehicles will persist, and that owning the data layer and operational know-how—not the self-driving technology itself—will keep it relevant.
