Dara Khosrowshahi on replacing Uber drivers — and himself — with AI
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Today, I’m talking with Uber CEO Dara Khosrowshahi. It’s become something of an annual tradition to have Dara join us in the studio when he comes to New York for Uber’s big GO-GET event every year, and it’s always a lot of fun.
The big news this year is that Dara is really starting to think about Uber as a much larger platform for travel — starting with the ability to book hotels in the Uber app, thanks to a partnership with Expedia. There’s also new services, like being able to have coffee and snacks in your Uber when it arrives, and even personal shopping. Uber is going so far as to call this an everything app, so I wanted to see how far Dara thinks everything actually goes — and whether he’s feeling pressure to own more of the user experience in a world where AI companies keep promising that their chatbots will book all the cars for you.
Verge subscribers, don’t forget you get exclusive access to ad-free Decoder wherever you get your podcasts. Head here . Not a subscriber? You can sign up here .
I also wanted to know if those chatbots have created any opportunities for Uber. Last year Dara told me he was wide open to partnerships just to see if they were meaningful, but all the AI Uber integrations I’ve seen so far have been pretty clunky, and far slower than just using the app myself. So we dug into what Dara is seeing there — and if there’s any potential in the future.
I’ve also been dying to talk to software CEOs about what AI is doing inside their companies, as AI coding tools and agentic systems upend software development. Just a couple of weeks ago, Uber’s CTO said the company had already burned through its entire token budget for the year by the start of April, and Dara told me he was rethinking how fast the company would hire people as it spent more money on tokens. That’s a big bet, and I wanted to know if Dara was rethinking how his software teams were structured as AI starts to muddle the relationship between product ma
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Today, I’m talking with Uber CEO Dara Khosrowshahi. It’s become something of an annual tradition to have Dara join us in the studio when he comes to New York for Uber’s big GO-GET event every year, and it’s always a lot of fun.
The big news this year is that Dara is really starting to think about Uber as a much larger platform for travel — starting with the ability to book hotels in the Uber app, thanks to a partnership with Expedia. There’s also new services, like being able to have coffee and snacks in your Uber when it arrives, and even personal shopping. Uber is going so far as to call this an everything app, so I wanted to see how far Dara thinks everything actually goes — and whether he’s feeling pressure to own more of the user experience in a world where AI companies keep promising that their chatbots will book all the cars for you.
Verge subscribers, don’t forget you get exclusive access to ad-free Decoder wherever you get your podcasts. Head here . Not a subscriber? You can sign up here .
I also wanted to know if those chatbots have created any opportunities for Uber. Last year Dara told me he was wide open to partnerships just to see if they were meaningful, but all the AI Uber integrations I’ve seen so far have been pretty clunky, and far slower than just using the app myself. So we dug into what Dara is seeing there — and if there’s any potential in the future.
I’ve also been dying to talk to software CEOs about what AI is doing inside their companies, as AI coding tools and agentic systems upend software development. Just a couple of weeks ago, Uber’s CTO said the company had already burned through its entire token budget for the year by the start of April, and Dara told me he was rethinking how fast the company would hire people as it spent more money on tokens. That’s a big bet, and I wanted to know if Dara was rethinking how his software teams were structured as AI starts to muddle the relationship between product ma
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