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AI Agents Have Barely Made a Dent in Uber, DoorDash and Airbnb
Third party AI agents are still a tiny source of business for Uber, DoorDash and Airbnb: Uber counted four rides and about 500 Uber Eats orders against roughly 320 million combined transactions in Halloween week. Low usage is only part of the challenge: platforms can also limit agents’ access, while companies build...
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Key takeaways
- Third party AI agents are still a tiny source of business for Uber, DoorDash and Airbnb: Uber counted four rides and about 500 Uber Eats orders against roughly 320 million combined transactions in Halloween week.
- Low usage is only part of the challenge: platforms can also limit agents’ access, while companies build AI features within their own services.
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openai.comCreate a landscape editorial hero image for this Studio Global article: What do Uber’s Nov. 4, DoorDash’s Oct. 29 and Airbnb’s Nov. 5 third-quarter earnings-call comments reveal about the gap between Silicon Vall. Article summary: The comments point to a large gap between the promise of AI agents handling everyday purchases and their actual use: outside agents currently generate negligible business for Uber, DoorDash and Airbnb. Retailer restricti. Topic tags: general, general web, user generated. Style: premium digital editorial illustration, source-backed research mood, clean composition, high detail, modern web publication hero. Use reference image context only for broad subject, composition, and topical grounding; do not copy the exact image. Avoid: logos, brand marks, copyrighted characters, real person likenesses, fake screenshots, UI text, readable text, watermarks, charts with fa
Recent earnings-call comments offer a reality check on claims that AI agents are ready to handle everyday transactions. Uber reported just four agent-booked rides and about 500 Uber Eats orders during Halloween week, while DoorDash and Airbnb also described very limited activity. The figures are early signals—not proof that agents will never catch on—and they are not directly comparable across companies. 2
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What the companies reported
- Uber: During Halloween week, the company handled roughly 320 million combined rides and food-delivery transactions. AI agents accounted for four rides and about 500 Uber Eats orders. Those counts refer to that week, even though they were discussed on Uber’s third-quarter earnings call.
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- DoorDash: CEO Tony Xu described the total number of orders placed by personal AI assistants as “maybe several hundred” since launch.
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- Airbnb: CEO Brian Chesky described bookings by Meta’s Muse and Instinct agents as “very, very low.” The available reporting does not provide a directly comparable booking count.
The scale is striking, but the measures differ: Uber gave a one-week count alongside a high-volume-week denominator, DoorDash described orders since launch, and Airbnb’s comment was qualitative. They point in the same direction—limited current use—without making a clean company-to-company comparison possible. 2
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Why a capable agent may still see little use
An agent has to do more than complete a transaction. It needs to make the process meaningfully easier for customers, and it must be able to access the service it is meant to use. The disclosures establish low transaction counts; on their own, they do not tell us exactly why customers have not adopted agents more widely.
For trips and meals, customers may value help finding options without wanting to hand over the final decision. That distinction matters: assisting with a choice is different from independently booking or ordering. It also helps explain why companies can be developing their own AI features even as outside agents account for little business. Fortune reports that Uber, DoorDash and Airbnb are all working on AI tools for their services, including Uber Eats’ Cart Assistance. 2
Platform access is another hurdle
Even when customers want an agent to shop or book, the agent still needs access to the relevant platform. In November, The Verge reported that eBay appeared to block agents including Meta’s Muse from retrieving listing links and details; the report describes an observed access problem, not a confirmed explanation of its full scope. 19
Retailer approaches also vary. Amazon sued Perplexity over agent access and blocked Meta’s Muse from shopping on Amazon, while The Verge reported that Muse encountered Target’s bot check on one occasion but got through on another. These examples show that access can be uneven; they do not establish that platform restrictions caused the low transaction counts reported by Uber, DoorDash or Airbnb. 17
The early lesson: assistance is not the same as autonomy
The earnings-call figures support a narrow conclusion: third-party agents currently generate very little reported activity on these services. They do not settle how useful agents might become, or how quickly adoption could change. For now, the distinction to watch is between AI that helps people navigate a service and AI that can reliably complete a transaction on their behalf—with both customer uptake and platform access still in play. 2
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Third party AI agents are still a tiny source of business for Uber, DoorDash and Airbnb: Uber counted four rides and about 500 Uber Eats orders against roughly 320 million combined transactions in Halloween week.
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Third party AI agents are still a tiny source of business for Uber, DoorDash and Airbnb: Uber counted four rides and about 500 Uber Eats orders against roughly 320 million combined transactions in Halloween week. Low usage is only part of the challenge: platforms can also limit agents’ access, while companies build AI features within their own services.
Sources
theverge.comeBay appears to have shut the door on third-party AI agents