Uber wants to be more than a ride-hailing app. CEO Dara Khosrowshahi says it’s a place for finding work.
So far, Uber has built its reputation as an app that offers users rides to the airport or a meal delivered to their front door, Khosrowshahi said on the company’s third-quarter earnings call on Tuesday.
“Another way of looking at our platform is that we’re a platform for work,” he said. Besides transportation, “we can empower other kinds of work as well,” Khosrowshahi said.
Last month, Uber said it would start a pilot program offering gigs for training AI in the US. Uber already offers the work, which Uber calls Digital Tasks, to users in India.
Those tasks can involve annotating videos captured by security cameras or training an AI model on voice responses, Khosrowshahi said on Tuesday’s call.
Many of those gigs can be done by people who already use the Uber app to drive passengers or make deliveries.
Uber and other ride-hailing services are experimenting with self-driving cars, prompting some human drivers to reconsider the long-term viability of making money as drivers. Khosrowshahi has said that Digital Tasks represent a potential answer for drivers who might be displaced by robotaxis in the future.
Other work, though, requires attracting a new group of more educated users to Uber’s app, he said.
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“Some of the roles require PhDs, for example, in physics, in order to get the gig done,” Khosrowshahi said, adding that the pay for such gigs is higher than for Uber drivers.
Khosrowshahi said Digital Tasks are an “opportunity to provide more work as the nature of work changes going forward.” While it’s a small part of the business today, he said Uber could expand its AI business as it did with ride-hailing and food delivery. Uber is already “landing a ton of customers” that need people to train AI for them, he said.
“We think this can ultimately be another profitable line of business for us,” Khosrowshahi said.
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