Uber’s product chief says travel, AI and autonomy are reshaping the app — but not into an everything app

Uber is expanding well beyond ride-hailing and food delivery, adding hotel bookings, shopping tools, and other travel features while also building new data and AI businesses behind the scenes. The changes matter because they show how Uber is trying to deepen customer loyalty, grow profit, and strengthen its position in autonomous vehicles without turning itself into a catch-all super app.

That strategy was laid out in a recent interview with Uber Chief Product Officer Sachin Kansal, who described travel as the company’s next major growth pillar, explained why Uber prefers selective partnerships over owning every part of the transaction, and outlined how the company is using AI and a new AV Labs unit to support its autonomy ambitions.

Uber’s next phase is about travel, not just rides

Uber has spent the past year quietly broadening its core app into a more comprehensive travel platform. The company’s latest additions include hotel reservations through Expedia, “shop for me” features for local purchases, and even boat rentals in parts of Europe. Those moves are not random experiments, according to Kansal. They are part of a deliberate push to make travel a more integrated part of the Uber experience.

The logic is straightforward: people who travel often need more than a ride from point A to point B. They need airport transfers, a place to stay, food once they arrive, and sometimes shopping or local mobility options. Uber believes it can stitch those pieces together without forcing users into separate apps for every step.

Kansal said the company sees travel as a “third leg” alongside rides and delivery, framing it as a natural extension of the platform rather than a detour from Uber’s main business.

That framing also helps explain why Uber has been willing to partner rather than build every product itself. In hotels, for example, the company chose a deep integration with Expedia. In other areas, especially where the use case is less proven, Uber may begin with a lighter handoff to a partner and only later decide whether to bring the experience more fully into its own app.

Why Uber is adding hotels, shopping and rentals

Uber says the opportunity is anchored in behavior already visible on the platform. The company says about 1.5 billion trips a year happen outside a rider’s home city, which means a large share of its users are already in travel mode. That gives Uber an opening to offer adjacent services at the exact moment they are needed.

For the company, the appeal is not only convenience. Travel is a high-value setting in which a single customer may need multiple services in a short time. A person landing in a new city might book a hotel, request a ride from the airport, order food, and buy items from a local store. If Uber can own more of that sequence, it increases engagement and creates more ways to monetize one user trip.

That strategy also reflects a broader shift in consumer expectations. In many markets, large platforms are trying to become the default layer for several daily needs. Uber has not embraced the “everything app” label, but it is clearly testing how far its brand can stretch.

What made the cut — and what did not?

Uber’s product team does not launch every idea that gets built. Kansal said the company uses its annual product showcase to highlight the subset of experiments it believes are ready for a public debut. This year, the unifying theme was travel.

The hotel launch was the headline announcement, but the supporting features matter as well. Uber wants travelers to use the same app for transportation, lodging, and errands. In Kansal’s view, that layered approach mirrors how the business has evolved historically: first rides, then delivery, now travel.

• Rides remain Uber’s foundational mobility product.
• Eats expanded the platform into local commerce and delivery.
• Travel is now being positioned as the next growth category.

How Uber’s membership program is helping cross-sell services

Uber One has become one of the most important tools in the company’s effort to connect its products. Uber says the membership program now has 51 million members and accounts for roughly half of bookings, a sign that the subscription has moved from a loyalty add-on to a core commercial engine.

The company says the economics are designed to encourage repeated use. On the delivery side, Uber says it typically takes only two to three orders for a subscriber to recover the cost of the monthly fee. Once users feel they are getting value, Uber says they tend to use the service more often and across more categories.

The cross-sell effect is particularly important. Uber says it is seeing mobility-only users adopt delivery and delivery-only users begin to book rides. That matters because the company’s long-term strategy depends on convincing customers that Uber is useful throughout the day, not just in a single context.

Is Uber becoming a financial services company?

Uber is building financial tools, but it is still trying to define how far that expansion should go. Kansal said financial services now touches multiple groups connected to the platform, including consumers, drivers, couriers and merchants. The company already has products for earners, and it is experimenting with merchant-focused tools in some markets.

For drivers and couriers, Uber offers the Uber Pro card, a debit product that lets them move earnings more easily. For consumers, the company is using Uber credits as an internal currency of sorts, especially inside the membership program. A hotel booking, for instance, can generate credits that can later be used for rides or Eats.

The company is more cautious when it comes to consumer banking-style products. Kansal did not commit to launching a proprietary buy now, pay later service. Instead, he emphasized that Uber prefers to work with specialists when a partner is already strong in a given category.

Kansal said Uber’s product philosophy is not to “be everything to everyone,” and that the company prefers to let experts handle services they already do well.

That answer is revealing. Uber clearly wants to increase the financial value flowing through its platform, but it is not signaling an intent to become a full-service bank. The more likely model is a mix of direct products, embedded rewards, and partner-led financial offerings at checkout.

What does Uber’s partnership strategy say about the company?

It says Uber is trying to grow without overextending itself. The company’s recent product moves suggest a selective super-app approach: own the experiences that strengthen the core platform, and outsource the rest when a partner can move faster or deliver better expertise.

That shows up in the way Uber handles new categories. In some cases, such as Expedia-backed hotels, the company chose to build a deeply integrated user experience. In other cases, like certain boat rental flows in Europe, Uber sends users out to a partner’s booking funnel instead of recreating the entire product inside the app.

This model has a practical advantage. Full integrations take time, technical coordination and commercial alignment. A lighter handoff lets Uber test demand first. If the service proves popular, the company can decide whether deeper integration is worth the effort.

Why not build everything in-house?

Because speed and focus matter. Uber is balancing many initiatives at once, from mobility to delivery to travel, finance and autonomy. Building every edge of every product would slow execution and dilute attention from the areas that most directly affect revenue and user retention.

The company’s behavior suggests it is choosing complexity strategically. It is willing to add new categories, but not willing to own every operational burden that comes with them. That is a more measured strategy than the classic super-app playbook seen in parts of Asia, where one platform often becomes the center of commerce, messaging, transport and payments.

How is Uber thinking about competition?

Uber says it is not obsessing over rivals, even though it faces plenty of them. In rides, that includes companies such as Lyft in the U.S., Didi and 99 in Latin America, and Bolt and Ola in other regions. In delivery, Uber competes with players such as DoorDash and Delivery Hero.

Still, Kansal said competition is not what occupies most of his time. The real question, from Uber’s perspective, is whether the company is extracting the full value of its network and serving users as well as it can. That is a useful line because it reframes the company’s growth agenda as customer-centric rather than competitive.

In practice, of course, the two are linked. Uber’s ability to expand into hotels, shopping and travel depends in part on whether customers keep returning to the app instead of switching to specialized rivals. But the company is betting that a broader utility layer will increase stickiness even in crowded markets.

Uber Eats is now profitable on its own

One of the most consequential parts of Uber’s current story is financial: the company says Uber Eats has become independently profitable over the past several quarters. That marks a major shift for a business that spent years needing support from the company’s broader platform economics.

During its early years, Eats was still climbing toward scale. Today, Uber says the segment is not only profitable but generating substantial profit. That gives the company more room to invest in adjacent categories, including travel features and AI tools, without relying as heavily on delivery subsidies or ride-hailing margins.

The profitability claim also matters because it changes how investors may think about Uber’s strategic priorities. If Eats can stand on its own, then product additions that deepen engagement across mobility and delivery become easier to justify. Travel, in that sense, becomes not a distraction but a reinforcement of the platform’s economics.

What is AV Labs and why does it matter?

AV Labs is Uber’s new autonomous-vehicle-focused data operation, and it may prove to be one of the most strategically important things the company is building right now. Uber says the unit is about six months old and is designed to collect driving data using sensor-equipped vehicles separate from its regular driver network.

The company says the fleet will be deployed through partners and will ultimately gather millions of miles of road data. Uber frames the initiative as a way to improve its relationships with autonomous-vehicle partners, but the move also serves as a hedge. If Uber owns more of the data layer, it gains leverage and optionality in a market where suppliers and platform partners increasingly overlap.

This is especially important because Uber does not plan to become an autonomous-vehicle manufacturer or a full-stack self-driving operator. Instead, it wants to be the platform where multiple AV providers can plug into the same marketplace. That approach preserves Uber’s role as the routing and demand layer even if the vehicles themselves come from competing companies.

Why collect your own driving data?

Because autonomy is still a long-tail problem. Uber says the value of this data is not just in common driving patterns, but in rare edge cases: unusual curbside pickup situations, awkward drop-offs, and the kinds of anomalies that autonomous systems must eventually handle safely.

In addition to the miles themselves, Uber says it has operational knowledge from its millions of drivers and couriers that autonomous companies do not always possess. The company pointed to issues like pickup coordination and the handling of lost items, which remain routine in human-driven networks but become complicated in autonomous ones.

Those details may sound mundane, but they are exactly the kind of practical challenges that can determine whether robotaxis work at scale. A self-driving vehicle that can navigate traffic but not manage real-world rider behavior is not yet a full transportation solution.

How is Uber handling Waymo?

Uber is treating Waymo as both a partner and a competitor, depending on the city. The companies launched together in Phoenix with a relatively small pilot, but Uber later ended that test. In Austin and Atlanta, however, the partnership has grown to hundreds of vehicles, making those markets much more significant.

Kansal said the Phoenix pilot was mutually wound down after Uber and Waymo decided it no longer made sense to continue. The broader message is that Uber sees itself as infrastructure for a hybrid transportation network rather than as a direct autonomous-vehicle builder.

That distinction is important. Uber does not want to win a race to build its own Level 4 autonomy system. It wants to create the “race tracks,” as Kansal described it, so multiple players can operate on top of the same demand engine.

In other words, Uber’s endgame is not ownership of the car. It is ownership of the connection between passenger demand, driver supply, and autonomous capacity.

What is Uber doing with AI right now?

Uber is already using AI in ways riders, drivers and couriers can see. The company’s goal is not to market abstract AI features, but to improve practical tasks that people do inside the app every day.

For earners, Uber has built an assistant that can help identify where demand is strongest and where a driver might earn more. For delivery users, there is a grocery cart assistant that turns simple item requests into a ready-to-order basket. For riders, voice input can now be used to describe a trip with more detail, such as the number of passengers and luggage.

These features may sound incremental, but they point to a larger transformation. If the app can understand intent rather than just taps and menus, Uber can reduce friction and become more useful in more situations.

Could AI make Uber more agentic?

Yes, but not immediately. Kansal said Uber sees AI as a major enabler of a future in which users can ask an assistant to plan and book an entire trip, while the platform handles the complexity in the background.

He also said the company is being careful not to launch an AI feature simply for the sake of having one. That caution is telling. Uber seems aware that a poorly functioning assistant could frustrate users more than it helps them, especially in a product environment where reliability matters.

The likely path is gradual: first task completion, then conversational booking, then more complete trip orchestration. If Uber gets that right, AI could become the glue between rides, delivery, hotels and other services.

How does Uber think about data and privacy?

Uber says it is not recording conversations between riders and drivers for its autonomy-related data work. Kansal emphasized that there is no live trip audio capture as part of the ride experience for that purpose.

Instead, the company says data collection occurs when earners are not actively transporting passengers or making deliveries. In those sessions, they may listen to audio and transcribe it, or simply speak outside the context of an active trip. Uber says participants are compensated for the work.

That distinction is likely intended to address privacy concerns that often surface around AI training and autonomous-vehicle data collection. At a minimum, Uber is drawing a line between real-time customer interactions and separate paid data work.

The company’s explanation also underscores a broader truth about AI deployment: the source of the data matters as much as the model itself. Companies that can gather labeled, structured data at scale may have a major advantage in building AI systems that work in the real world.

What Uber’s product priorities reveal about the company’s future

Kansal said he spends most of his time protecting and refining what Uber already has, rather than chasing the next big idea. He estimated that 70% to 80% of his work goes to making existing or soon-to-launch products as strong as possible, while the rest goes to new experiments.

That split says a lot about Uber’s current phase. The company is no longer in survival mode, but neither is it ready to throw every concept at the wall and see what sticks. It is trying to mature into a disciplined platform business that can scale into adjacent categories without losing control of the core experience.

He also said he still goes out and uses the product as both a driver and a courier, which is an unusually direct way of checking assumptions. For a company operating at Uber’s scale, that kind of hands-on feedback loop can be invaluable, especially as new features become more complex.

What this means for consumers and investors

For consumers, the near-term effect is likely to be a more versatile Uber app. Users will see more travel tools, more partner integrations, and more AI-assisted workflows. The app may not become a full super app overnight, but it is moving in that direction in practical, not ideological, ways.

For investors, the bigger story is diversification with discipline. Uber is adding revenue opportunities without fully abandoning its core identity. It is also working to deepen customer loyalty through subscriptions, increase monetization through travel and commerce, and create strategic leverage in the autonomy market.

The upside is meaningful. The risk is also clear: every new category makes the product more complicated. Uber’s challenge is to expand without overwhelming users or diluting the simplicity that made the app successful in the first place.

Timeline: key milestones in Uber’s latest strategy

The following timeline captures the main developments discussed in the interview and how they fit together.

Bottom line: Uber wants breadth, but on its own terms

Uber’s latest moves suggest a company that wants to be more useful without becoming unfocused. It is broadening into hotels, shopping and travel. It is making its membership program a stronger growth engine. It is experimenting with financial tools. It is laying groundwork for autonomy. And it is introducing AI where it can visibly improve the user experience.

But Uber is also sending a clear signal: it does not want to be everything for everyone. Instead, it wants to be the platform that can connect the right services at the right moment, while leaving enough room for partners, specialists and future technology to do their part.

That may be the most important business lesson in Uber’s current strategy. In a world full of sprawling platforms, the winning model may not be the one that owns every piece. It may be the one that orchestrates the most valuable ones well enough to keep people coming back.