Uber, DoorDash and Airbnb say AI agents aren’t taking off — as users rebel against being ‘hyper-efficient at fun’ | Daily Reports Online
- Several firms say almost no one is using AI agents to access their services
- Uber, DoorDash and Airbnb all say the numbers are comically low
- Users have pushed back against AI agents and questioned their necessity
The whole point of using an AI agent, whether that’s Meta’s Muse or OpenAI’s Dots, is that it will save you time, change the way you work and perform the tedious drudgery that you’d rather not do. But several firms, including Uber, DoorDash and Airbnb, have admitted that almost no one is using AI agents to access their services, suggesting that the agentic revolution we were all promised might not be materializing — for now, at least.
The three firms said (via TechSpot) that AI agents had only been used to perform a small handful of transactions in recent weeks, compared to the millions carried out by real people. Uber, for example, had 320 million car rides booked by humans during the week of Halloween. The amount placed by AI agents? Just four, an almost comically low number.
DoorDash CEO Tony Xu shared a similar experience, saying that AI agents were responsible for several hundred orders on the platform. While the numbers aren’t as low as on Uber, TechSpot noted that DoorDash receives billions of orders every year.
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And Airbnb CEO Brian Chesky argued that only a negligible portion of bookings on the app are made using AI agents. Chesky surmised that this might be because many people like to research trips themselves rather than hand everything over to an AI that can’t gauge the quality of a rental or the attractiveness of things to do nearby.
The AI agent backlash?
Part of the problem could be that AI agents are, in some cases, a solution in search of a problem. For instance, Uber’s chief financial officer Balaji Krishnamurthy stated that it takes people around 50 seconds to book a ride on the service, so it’s not exactly a longwinded process that AI agents can dramatically simplify.
There’s been something of a backlash on social media, too. On Reddit, one highly-upvoted comment noted that “thinking about what you feel like doing or eating is fun” and that few people are looking to become “hyper-efficient at having fun”. An AI agent, they argued, sucks the joy out of life’s seemingly-mundane pursuits.
Another user put it this way: “So instead of opening the DoorDash app to order a pizza, I have to open my AI Agent and tell them I’m hungry and want to eat pizza and it has to be less than $30? Seems like more work to me to use [an] AI Agent.”
Indeed, a recent report found that far from saving you time, AI tools are forcing many people to work an extra 90 minutes a day, while a separate study noted that workers are spending more time correcting AI content than doing actual work. Combined with the latest news from Uber, DoorDash and Airbnb, there’s a growing sense that AI isn’t always the time-saving solution it might appear on the surface.
Several companies and governments have already had enough of AI agents. The Wall Street Journal reports that United Airlines is banning AI bots from booking flights, while Alibaba has stopped its workers from using Claude Code and the Swedish government has blocked both Claude and ChatGPT over security concerns.
Perhaps one day AI agents will take off and everyone will be using them to streamline mundane tasks. But on the latest evidence, that day is a long way off — and there’s a feeling that not every task is necessarily ripe for automation.
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