UBER Q3 2026 earnings call transcript, November 4, 2026

In addition to the membership discounts that we give to our consumers, if you look at our ad business and merchant funded promotions, they grew to over $10 billion on a year-on-year basis. And, you know, these are dollars that we're giving to our consumers and the return for merchants is, you know, new consumers and kind of higher penetration in the marketplace. So all of it is working at this point. If there's one. The issue is it rhymes with mobility in that we continue to invest in delivery in couriers to make sure that, you know, kind of our courier growth keeps up with the consumer demand that we're seeing on the on the food side that. It is right now the biggest challenge that we've got, but the team we think is more than up for it. Next question, please.

Your next question comes from Mark Mahaney with Evercore. Your line is open.

And Mark, just a little bit more so you understand the picture in terms of supply and demand. You know, we have base pricing for both kind of our consumer pricing and then base pricing for driver, courier, pay, etc. Then we have incentives and there are kind of call it riders. Driver side incentives, driver side incentives, eater side incentives, you know, and then kind of courier incentives as well. These are more flexible dollars that we target times, you know, like Halloween, make sure drivers show up, etc. We'll target places. If we think that there's a ball game going on, we'll put incentives for drivers to show up to the ball game at the right time. But the cool thing is that we just rebate. balance incentives between riders and drivers, for example, in this case. And so whereas last year, more of the incentives went to riders to reduce price, now this year we're taking down rider incentives and we're using those dollars to fund driver incentives. Now that does mean sometimes higher prices for riders, which is something that we watch out for. We will do trade-offs against profitability, but that's something that we handle. But there is a flexible incentive pool that we allocate to supply or demand based on the balance of the marketplace. And that's part of kind of the art that we've got. And then there's a lot of science, algorithmic science that goes into, hey, if you have a dollar, what is the maximum predicted return for that dollar? And should I invest that dollar in a driver in Brazil? Or should I invest that dollar in a rider in India, for example?

And the algorithms are making these choices, and they structurally can make these choices based on, you know, trading on billions of trips. And, you know, they can allocate these investments in a way that humans just can't. Thank you, Dara. Thank you, both. Last question, please. Your last question will come from Doug Anmuth with JPMorgan. Your line is open. Thanks so much for the question. Dara, something to get your latest thoughts on AI agents. Can you just talk about some of the goals and differentiation that you can provide by building Agentec directly into the Uber?

And we are building our own AI experiences. You know, for example, we have a cart assistant, which we're very excited about. And early signal shows that baskets that you build with a cart assistant are roughly twice. The average of the average basket as well. And we're working on kind of each assistant, driver assistant, et cetera, to make sure that AI kind of we have the best AI systems that can get you in and out of our services very, very quickly. That said, we will have discussions with kind of third party AI agents. We think that it's another opportunity. to reach our platform. We think it'll be a net positive in terms of demand into the ecosystem and you can get based on kind of our services. There are a lot of every single AI system company is talking to us and we're really now negotiating the terms of trade. And the good news here is in most markets, you have two mobility, big mobility providers, two big delivery providers. You know, I think I can. And now there are eight different assistants and I think there'll be more than 10 assistants. So I think, you know, that we build are very large. I think the demands on our services are going to be very, very high. So something we're really excited about. Now, it's pretty small. Balaji, I think you were telling me, AI, what are the transaction volumes at this point? Yeah. So I think just to put numbers to it, we had one of our largest weeks last week because it was Halloween. So we did just around 320.

million trips on Uber and Uber Eats. The volumes coming from AI agents for Uber Eats were around 500, 500 orders total. And for our rides business, it was a grand total of four trips that we fulfilled from it. So it's very, very early and very limited traction that we're seeing so far. Yeah, listen, we hope that there will be more traction. Like we do think that we want to make services that are available to consumers in a delightful, easy way. We think our direct services are going to be the most delightful and easy, but we will work with these third parties. It's just very, very early. And we want to make sure we're not dependent on any one player. And I think we're very well positioned to. in this environment going forward. All right. Well, I think that's it. Thank you everyone for joining. Thank you, UBER team, for everything that you've done to deliver a great quarter. We're excited to close out the year, hopefully, with a really, really strong quarter. And a big thank you to our investors and our owners who put their dollars in. and faith in us as a company. More to come. Thank you. This concludes today's conference call. Thank you for joining. You may not disconnect.