Uber is in the hotel business now, thanks in part to AI

Uber customers in the United States can now book hotels directly through the app, one of several new features announced Wednesday that pushes far beyond the company’s original ride-hailing purpose and even deeper into its users’ lives. And in a pitch to sell more customers on its Uber One subscription, Uber said members will get 20% discounts on a rolling list of 10,000 hotels when booked through the app. Members will also receive 10% back in Uber Credits on all bookings. “We’re no longer just an app for rides, or even two apps, or [a] family of apps for both rides and eats,” Khosrowshahi said during the company’s event. “Uber is now an app for everything, where you can go, you can get, and now you can travel,” he said.

The hotel bookings, a new AI-powered voice-bookings feature, and a widespread search tool are among a handful of new products unveiled Wednesday that went from idea to launching in the app within months thanks to agentic AI tools like Cursor, Uber chief technology officer Praveen Neppalli Naga told TechCrunch. “What we have seen the last few months is a fundamental reset, a new way of building software,” Naga said, adding that this shift began late last year with the emergence of agentic AI. That timeframe has been cut in half, and he expects now that more engineers have adopted these agentic AI workflows, they will move even faster. “Our problems generally at Uber, it’s not the problem of not having ideas; there’s so many things we want to build,” he said. “It’s just always the problem of, we don’t have enough time or resourcing to build these things.” During its Go-Get event, Uber also launched travel mode, which gives users a guide covering tourist hotspots, local favorites, and other helpful information directly related to where they’re visiting. OpenAI ends Microsoft legal peril over its $50B Amazon deal Two college kids raise a $5.1 million pre-seed to build an AI social network in iMessage Meta’s loss is Thinking Machines’ gain Google to invest up to $40B in Anthropic in cash and compute OpenAI releases GPT-5.5, bringing company one step closer to an AI ‘super app’ Microsoft offers buyout for up to 7% of US employees Surveillance vendors caught abusing access to telcos to track people’s phone locations, researchers say

Source: TechCrunch