Uber enables outstanding on-demand experiences with AI
OpenAI
Uber is leaning on OpenAI's tech to make its customer support smarter and faster. The company says AI is now core to how it handles millions of rider and driver requests.
Based on reporting by OpenAI — read the original for the full story.
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Uber's customer service operation is enormous by default: hundreds of millions of trips a year, each one a chance for something to go sideways. In a new conversation published on OpenAI's blog, Jai Malkani, who leads AI and product for Uber's Customer Obsession team, walks through how the company has been retooling that operation around generative AI rather than the traditional call-center playbook.
Malkani's framing is less about chatbots replacing humans and more about giving support agents a system that already understands the context of a rider's or driver's problem before a human even looks at it. Uber has been feeding its support stack with OpenAI's models to triage tickets, suggest resolutions, and handle the repetitive stuff — refund requests, account issues, trip disputes — so human agents can spend time on the messier cases that actually need judgment.
What stands out is the emphasis on speed as a product feature, not just an efficiency play. Uber's whole business model depends on immediacy — you open the app, you expect a car in minutes — and Malkani argues that support has to match that same expectation. A rider stuck on a canceled ride at 2 a.m. doesn't want to wait in a queue; they want an answer now, and AI is being positioned as the tool that makes
My take — AI-written commentary, not fact-checked reporting
I'll believe the AI-support story once wait times actually shrink for real users, not just internal metrics slides. Every company says its chatbot 'lets humans focus on complex cases' — that's the corporate way of saying it's cutting headcount. Uber's scale makes this a genuinely useful testbed, but I'd want independent data before crowning it a win for customer experience rather than cost control.
Read more about this at: OpenAI