Uber’s CEO on his plan to make Uber an everything app and take over travel.
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.
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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.
