Uber 产品负责人谈酒店预订、自动驾驶出租车及公司为何不想成为"万能应用"

在过去的一年里，Uber悄悄地将业务拓展到了大多数人熟知的两个主营业务之外。当然，有网约车和配送业务，但如果你在应用中花时间，你现在还会发现由Expedia提供支持的酒店预订、“为我购物”礼宾功能，以及欧洲的船只租赁。

从内部来看，也发生了很多事情。比如为司机提供借记卡，为那些希望赚更多钱的司机提供数据标注副业，以及一个刚成立六个月的业务部门——AV实验室：https://techcrunch.com/2026/01/27/uber-launches-an-av-labs-division-to-gather-driving-data-for-robotaxi-partners/，该部门正在开发一支配备传感器的车队，这与Uber常规司机网络分开，旨在收集越来越多的驾驶数据。Uber将这一举措描述为加强与自动驾驶汽车合作伙伴关系的一种方式，其中一些合作伙伴Uber也持有股份，但这看起来也像是一种对冲。Uber直接与其中一些合作伙伴竞争，其中Waymo尤为突出，而掌握数据层既能为Uber提供一定杠杆，又增加了多种选择的可能性。

Uber是否会发展成类似亚洲一些超级应用（如Grab）的全能“万能App”，仍未可知。但在这次对话中，Uber首席产品官Sachin Kansal向TechCrunch介绍了公司的金融服务愿景，其与Waymo日益复杂的关系：https://techcrunch.com/2026/07/13/ubers-robotaxi-lobbying-effort-has-put-it-on-a-collision-course-with-waymo/、新的AV实验室数据运作，以及AI开始以乘客和司机能实际感知到的方式出现。

本次采访经过了缩减长度和清晰度编辑。

你们今年早些时候推出了酒店、船只租赁和更多购物功能。这份清单是如何制定的，哪些功能没有入选？

每年我们的团队显然都会构建很多东西，其中一部分我们认为值得在最大的舞台上与世界分享。今年我们倾向的主题确实是旅行——在Uber平台上，每年有15亿次行程实际上发生在用户的本地城市之外，所以我们知道旅行对于Uber用户来说是一个非常常见的使用场景。我们此次的重大发布实际上是作为与Expedia的合作推出在Uber上预订酒店。但旅行远不止于此——你需要从机场到酒店的交通，你还需要食物。我们从很多用户那里听到，他们中有很多人已经不再使用客房服务，而只是使用Uber Eats应用。通过“为我购物”，我们的目标是让你即使所选商店未在Uber Eats上提供也能从任何本地商店购买商品，并浏览完整商品目录。在我看来，旅行确实是Uber服务的第三个支柱——我们有出行，然后增加了餐饮，现在我们正在增加旅行服务。

Uber是否正朝着像亚洲的“万物应用”那样提供自己的金融服务发展？

对我们来说，金融服务涉及多个不同群体——消费者，还有司机、快递员，以及商家。我们目前有多种产品主要面向司机和快递员，其中包括我们所谓的Uber Pro卡，他们可以将所有收入转入该借记卡使用。我们现在正在全球某些地区尝试将这些产品用于商家。至于消费者，我们将看长期来看是否有意义。目前消费者有一种使用货币——我们称之为Uber积分——并与我们的会员计划相关联。例如在酒店预订上，会员在一次1000美元的交易中可获得10%的现金返还，即100美元作为积分返还，然后可以用于乘车和餐饮服务。

Uber会推出自己的先买后付产品吗？

我不确定，因为我们希望专家做他们擅长的事情。我们已经宣布与行业内提供此类服务的其他合作伙伴合作，所以在结账时你可以选择这种方式。在我们的整体产品策略上，我们并不打算对所有人提供所有服务。

在欧洲，使用租船服务时，点击标签会将用户转到合作伙伴的预订流程，而不是在 Uber 内完成结账。这种交接模式是否预示着未来的发展方向？

确实有一些情况，特别是当我们在尝试新事物时，会依赖我们的合作伙伴，因为双向整合确实需要大量时间，在某些情况下，先尝试再进行深度整合也很有意义。以 Expedia 为例，我们决定深度整合是最合理的——我们与 Expedia 合作，独立构建了整个用户界面。但在某些情况下，将后续体验交给该领域的专家可能更有意义，如果效果很好，我们总是可以进行深度整合。

你们的 Uber One 会员产品现在有 5100 万会员，占预订量的大约一半。你们有数据表明交叉销售确实奏效吗——例如一个送餐用户后来开始多次乘车？

在送餐方面，你大约需要下两到三单才能抵消你支付的月费。当会员对该计划更加习惯时，他们在已经使用的业务线上的使用频率会增加。这也促使了业务其他部分的使用——我们看到之前只使用出行服务的人也开始使用送餐服务，而之前只用送餐服务的人也开始使用出行服务。

盈利是科技行业中最困难的业务之一，Uber Eats 仍然依靠叫车业务保持健康吗？

在 Uber Eats 初期，它尚未盈利，但在过去几个季度，Uber Eats 已成为我们独立盈利的业务，并创造了大量利润。

我今年春天写了一篇报道：https://techcrunch.com/2026/05/10/uber-has-always-wanted-to-be-more-than-a-ride-now-it-has-reason-to-hurry/，将 Uber 描述为意外地与 Airbnb 直接竞争，而 Airbnb 现在通过合作伙伴提供机场接送服务。你认为是这样吗？你们最关注的竞争对手是谁？

竞争者并不缺乏——美国的Lyft，拉美的Didi和99，全球范围内的Bolt、Ola，在外卖方面的DoorDash、Delivery Hero。但我几乎很少花时间去思考这些。我更多的时间，或者让我夜不能寐的，是我们是否正在为用户提供我们能提供的所有价值。

你最近在扩大其他地区业务的同时，结束了：https://techcrunch.com/2026/06/29/waymo-and-uber-quietly-part-ways-in-phoenix/ 凤凰城的Waymo试点。在与同一供应商合作——并在一些城市中与其竞争时，你如何保持体验的一致性？

凤凰城是我们与Waymo首次合作的城市，当时大约有十几辆车，但我们的规模化启动是在奥斯汀和亚特兰大，那里的车辆有数百辆。最近当我们审视凤凰城试点时，我们双方一致认为继续下去没有意义。Waymo是我们优秀的合作伙伴，但在许多城市他们也是竞争者。我们并不在争夺成为L4自动驾驶供应商的赛道——我们关注的是铺设赛道，以便能与多个参与者合作。我们相信混合网络，即在同一城市中同时有人工驾驶和自动驾驶车辆，因为这可以让我们平衡供需。

关于AV Labs，Uber可以为自动驾驶合作伙伴提供哪些他们尚未拥有的东西？

我们将为数百辆汽车配备传感器，通过我们的车队合作伙伴部署，并通过这些车辆收集数百万英里的驾驶数据。这对解决长尾问题非常有帮助——你想看到所有边缘案例，而不仅仅是P95、P99级别的情况。除了数据本身，我们拥有来自1000万名司机的丰富经验，关于接送操作的情况。我们每年处理2500万个遗失物品——在自动驾驶的世界里你如何在运营上处理这些？这是我们能够带来的运营专业知识。

Uber是否在向生成式AI公司出售司机和乘客的数据？

我会把这个分成两部分。就生成式人工智能公司而言，我们可以利用我们的接单人员基础或者通过音频收集为他们标注数据，没错，我们与他们有商业关系，并且正在向他们出售数据——这是业务中新出现的一部分，我们对此非常看好。AV实验室是独立的，我们仍在探索将这些模型的数据与合作伙伴共享的方式。现在稍微有点早。

司机会为了这些数据工作录下与乘客的对话吗？

不，不，不——我想非常明确地说，在乘车过程中不会录制任何对话。当他们不在行程中，不在驾驶，也不在配送时，他们只是说话，或者听音频并进行转录。顺便说一句，他们会因此获得报酬。

人工智能在哪些方面让乘客或司机能够注意到？

如果你是我们平台上的接单人员，我们有一个接单助手——他们最关心的问题是如何赚更多的钱，它会提示你：其实在南湾地区需求不大，但你可能想去五英里开外的高需求地区。在Eats方面，有一个购物车助手，你可以说“我要牛奶、鸡蛋、面包”，它会很快帮你生成购物车。在打车方面，你可以用语音叫车——比如说“我需要去机场，有六件行李，六个人”。

那么，完全自主的Uber——“帮我计划并预订整个行程”——是否在眼前？

我无法给出具体日期，也不能确切说明功能组合，但我认为人工智能将成为这一点的重要推动力，让我可以将复杂性交给平台，只要告诉助手我具体想要什么。说起来容易做起来难——我们希望确保不是为了打勾而发布一个可能不太好用的助手。

作为首席产品官，你是如何在如此多的创意中进行优先排序的？

我会说我花70%到80%的时间确保我们现有的产品，或者即将推出的产品，尽可能地稳固。所有的新想法就像闪亮的物体——如果你有100个想法，也许只有五个是好的，而这五个则需要大量的培养和信念。所以大约20%的时间花在新想法上——顺便说一句，我会出去亲自驾驶和送货，以便亲眼从另一侧了解我们的产品。

当你通过我们文章中的链接购买时，我们可能会获得少量佣金：https://techcrunch.com/techcrunch-affiliate-monetization-standards/。这不会影响我们的编辑独立性。

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Uber has spent the last year quietly pushing beyond the two businesses most people associate it with. There’s ride-hailing, of course, and delivery, but spend time in the app and you’ll now find hotel bookings powered by Expedia, “shop for me” concierge features, and boat rentals in Europe.

Under the hood, so to speak, there’s also a lot happening. Think debit cards for drivers, a data-labeling side hustle for these same earners looking to make more moolah, and a six-month-old business unit called AV Labs：https://techcrunch.com/2026/01/27/uber-launches-an-av-labs-division-to-gather-driving-data-for-robotaxi-partners/, which is developing a fleet of sensor-equipped vehicles that’s separate from Uber’s regular driver network and designed to gather ever-larger amounts of driving data. Uber frames the initiative as a way to strengthen its relationships with autonomous vehicle partners, several of which it also holds equity in, but it sure looks like a hedge, as well. Uber competes directly with some of those same partners, with Waymo chief among them, and owning the data layer gives Uber both some leverage and optionality.

Whether Uber becomes a full-blown “everything app” similar to some Asian super-apps like Grab, remains an open question. But in this conversation, Uber Chief Product Officer Sachin Kansal walks TechCrunch through the company’s financial services ambitions, its increasingly complicated relationship：https://techcrunch.com/2026/07/13/ubers-robotaxi-lobbying-effort-has-put-it-on-a-collision-course-with-waymo/ with Waymo, its new AV Labs data operation, and how AI is starting to show up in ways riders and drivers will actually notice.

This interview has been edited for length and clarity.

You unveiled hotels, boat rentals, and more shopping features earlier this year. How did that list get made, and what didn’t make the cut?

Every year our teams are obviously building a lot of stuff, and a subset of that we decide is worth sharing with the world on the biggest stage. This year the theme that we gravitated towards was really travel — 1.5 billion trips on the Uber platform every year actually happen outside of a user’s home city, so we know that travel is something that’s a very common use case for Uber users. Our headline announcement this time was actually introducing hotels on Uber as a partnership with Expedia. But travel is so much more than that — you need rides to go from the airport to the hotel, and you need food. We heard from a lot of our users that a lot of them had stopped using room service and were just using the Uber Eats app. With “shop for me,” the goal was for us to enable you to shop from any local store even if that store is not available on Uber Eats with the entire catalog. Travel really is, in my opinion, the third leg of the stool — we had rides, then we added eats, and now we are adding travel.

Is Uber moving toward offering its own financial services, the way “everything apps” in Asia do?

Financial services for us cuts across multiple different entities — consumers, but also drivers and couriers, and merchants. We have multiple products today focused mostly on drivers and couriers, where we have what we call the Uber Pro card, which they can use as a debit card and transfer all their earnings onto. We are starting to experiment with some of those products for merchants in certain parts of the world right now. As far as consumers are concerned, we’ll see if that makes sense for us in the long term. Right now there is a currency for consumers to use — we call them Uber credits — and this ties to our membership program. On hotels, for example, members get 10% cash back on a $1,000 transaction, that’s $100 back as credit that you can then use on rides and eats.

Would Uber ever offer its own buy now, pay later product?

I’m not sure, because we want to make sure that the experts do what the experts do. We already have announced partnerships with others in the industry who are already providing that service, so that at checkout you have the ability to do that. In terms of our general product strategy, we’re not trying to be everything to everyone.

With boat rentals, in Europe, tapping the tab hands users off to a partner’s own booking flow rather than checking out inside Uber. Is that handoff model a template for what’s coming?

Definitely there are some instances, especially when we are doing something new, for us to rely on our partners, because a two-way integration just does take a lot of time, and in some cases it’s good for us to try before we integrate deeply. In the case of Expedia, we decided it just makes sense to integrate deeply — we built the entire UI on our own in partnership with Expedia. But in some cases it may make sense for us to hand off the rest of the experience to the experts in that field, and if you get great traction, we can always integrate them deeply.

Your Uber One membership product now has 51 million members and accounts for roughly half of bookings. Do you have data showing the cross-sell actually works — that a delivery user later starts taking more rides?

On the delivery side, it takes you two to three orders for you to break even the monthly fee that you pay. As members get more habituated to the program, it’s increasing their frequency within the line of business they are already using. And it’s also leading to more usage of the other sides of the business — we are seeing people who are mobility only also start to use delivery, and people who are delivery only also start to use mobility.

Delivery has been one of the hardest businesses in tech to make profitable. Is Uber Eats still leaning on ride-hailing to stay healthy?

During the early years of Uber Eats it was not profitable yet, but over the last several quarters, Uber Eats has been independently a profitable business for us, and generating a lot of profit.

A story I wrote this spring：https://techcrunch.com/2026/05/10/uber-has-always-wanted-to-be-more-than-a-ride-now-it-has-reason-to-hurry/ framed Uber as unexpectedly competing more directly with Airbnb, which is now offering airport transfers through a partner. Do you see it that way? Who are you most focused on?

There’s no dearth of competitors — Lyft in the U.S., Didi and 99 in Latin America, Bolt, Ola around the world, and on delivery, DoorDash, Delivery Hero. But I only spend a very small percentage of my time thinking about that. The bigger percentage of my time, or what keeps me up at night, is are we providing our users all the value that we can provide.

You recently wound down：https://techcrunch.com/2026/06/29/waymo-and-uber-quietly-part-ways-in-phoenix/ the Waymo pilot in Phoenix while scaling elsewhere. How do you keep the experience coherent when you’re partnering with — and in some cities competing with — the same supplier?

Phoenix was the first city that we launched with Waymo, with about a dozen cars, but our scale launches have been in Austin and Atlanta, where we have hundreds of cars with them. When we recently looked at the Phoenix pilot, we mutually decided that it doesn’t make sense for us to continue. Waymo is an excellent partner of ours, but in many cities they’re also a competitor. We are not in the race to be an L4 autonomy provider — what we are focusing on is laying down the race tracks so we can work with multiple players. We believe in the hybrid network, human drivers as well as autonomous vehicles in the same city, because it allows us to balance demand and supply.

Regarding AV Labs, what can Uber offer autonomy partners that they don’t already have?

We are going to be equipping hundreds of cars with sensors, deployed through our fleet partners, and through that we’ll be collecting millions of miles’ worth of driving data. That really helps with the long-tail problem — you want to see all the edge cases, not just the P95, P99 level. Beyond the data itself, there’s so much know-how from our 10 million earners in terms of how pickups and drop-offs work. We handle 25 million lost items every single year — how do you operationally handle that in the world of autonomy? That’s the kind of operational expertise we can bring.

Is Uber selling driver and rider data to GenAI companies?

I would divide this into two parts. In terms of GenAI companies, we are able to label data for them using our earner base, or through audio collection, and yes, we have commercial relationships with them and we are selling it to them — that’s a part of the business that is new, and we are extremely bullish about it. AV Labs is separate, and we are still figuring those models out for sharing that data with partners. It’s a little early.

Are drivers recording conversations with riders for this data work?

No, no, no — I want to be very clear, there’s no conversation being recorded as part of that while they’re on a ride. When they’re not on a trip, they’re not driving, they’re not delivering, they’re just talking, or they’re listening to a piece of audio and transcribing it. They get paid for doing that, by the way.

Where has AI actually shown up in ways a rider or driver would notice?

If you are an earner on our platform, we have an earner assistant — the number one question on their mind is how do I make more money, and it will say, look, it’s actually pretty light in the South Bay, but you may want to go five miles away where there’s a lot of demand. On the Eats side, there’s a grocery cart assistant where you can say “I want milk, eggs, bread” and it creates the cart very quickly. And on rides, you’re able to use voice to request a ride — say “I’m looking for a ride to the airport, I have six pieces of luggage, six people.”

So a fully agentic Uber — “plan and book my whole trip” — is on the horizon?

I can’t put a date on it, and I can’t tell you exactly what the feature set will be, but I think AI is going to be a huge enabler of that, where I can leave the complexity to the platform and just tell an agent what exactly I want. Easier said than done — we want to make sure we’re not just checking a box by shipping an agent that maybe doesn’t work that well.

As CPO, how do you personally prioritize with so many ideas in flight?

I would say I spend 70% to 80% of my time making sure that our existing products, or the products we are about to launch, are as solid as possible. All the new ideas are like shiny objects — if you have 100 ideas, maybe five of them are good, and those five then need a lot of cultivation and conviction. So probably 20% of the time is on new ideas — including, by the way, I go out and drive and deliver myself, just to see our product from the other side firsthand.

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