Latest news with #UberforBusiness
Time of India
4 days ago
- Business
- Time of India
More reliability, peace of mind: Pre-scheduled ride's a preferred choice for riders
Uber today released key 2024 trends for Uber Reserve, its pre-scheduled ride option, showing a sharp rise in usage across Indian cities as more riders explore the advance- travel-booking feature. Tired of too many ads? go ad free now With bookings growing close to 200% year-on-year, Reserve is becoming the preferred choice for riders looking for reliability, especially for odd-hour airport trips, festival travel, and business commutes. Nearly one in four airport drop-offs now happen via Reserve, showing growing demand for certainty when timing matters most, with Delhi, Bangalore, Mumbai, Hyderabad, and Chennai leading in usage. Airport drop-offs were the primary use case for Reserve during 2024, with as much as 40% of overall Reserve trips ending at an airport. Beyond the airport use case, spikes in Reserve bookings were observed during wedding seasons, exam dates, and major festivals like Diwali, Eid, and Christmas, where the usage increased almost 15% ahead of public holidays. Intercity travel using Reserve also rose significantly, up 40% during the Diwali festive period, and close to 30% over long weekends during 2024. Speaking on the growth of the product, Shweta Mantri, Head of Rider Verticals, Uber India and South Asia, said: 'Riders are telling us what they value most - reliability, flexibility, and peace of mind. Uber Reserve is helping them take more control of their time and their travel. Whether it's for a flight, a meeting, or a family celebration,Reserve is becoming the preferred choice for planned journeys across India. ' Riders have the option to book Reserve trips up to 90 days in advance, and in one case, a rider booked their trip as early as 89 days ahead, reflecting the faith they put in their trusted ride option. The average lead time for Reserve bookings was 9 hours during 2024. Tired of too many ads? go ad free now Popular Reserve time slots included 4-6 AM for flights, and 7-10 AM for office commutes. Reserve trips made through Uber for Business rose 140% year-on-year, and now make up a tenth of all Reserve bookings - a sign that working professionals are increasingly opting for more control and certainty with pre-scheduled transport. In terms of product adoption, Chennai led the charge during 2024, with the highest proportion of the overall trips being reserved ahead, followed by Bangalore and Hyderabad. With growing momentum across use cases and cities, Uber Reserve is poised to play a larger role in how India plans its travel. As rider expectations evolve, Uber remains committed to building solutions that offer greater control, reliability, and peace of mind.
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Business Standard
23-05-2025
- Automotive
- Business Standard
Uber says Gen AI, agentic AI boost engineers' productivity, cut delays
Generative artificial intelligence (Gen AI) and Agentic AI are making some critical interventions to Uber's core operations, thus improving productivity of its engineers, said an executive of the ride-hailing platform. Some of these operations include customer support, relooking at the engineering development lifecycle and easing up driver on-boarding. A lot of these systems used to be manually operated but AI agents and automation have reduced human intervention over the last few years. 'Let us consider that drivers are not able to go online. We have 3,000 services internally and the problem is where to start,' Praveen Neppalli Naga, global chief technology officer (CTO) of mobility and delivery, said in an interaction with Business Standard. He added, 'Now, we have a graph of all service calls which are monitored by AI and so if something is failing, we are able to identify the error quickly and detect the area of failure.' Similarly, the entire on-boarding experience of drivers used to be manual with huge amounts of background checks and document verifications which took up a lot of time. Uber now leverages AI to complete these tasks, resulting in quicker on-boarding of drivers. For customer support, Uber uses a chatbot just like countless other companies that is automated. This, according to Naga, 'improves quality and productivity. To understand the way a product works in a certain market, it involves reading documents. Now, we have the internal AI tools to answer it.' Naga added that the use of Cursor, an AI code editor, has improved operations. He said, 'It is a tool we leverage, and helps us develop in an agentic way. That includes the development lifecycle, defining the product, coding, testing, deploying, monitoring and alerting. Here we use the AI models to understand which metrics went down so that the engineers can step in quickly.' Uber, which has about 2,200 engineers in its two biggest engineering centres in Bengaluru and Hyderabad, said it will continue to hire at a steady pace. This will be in areas such as earner ecosystem, rider experience products, and marketplace teams. The two centres handle critical functions for Uber, such as rider engineering, Eats engineering, infra-tech, data, maps, Uber for Business, fintech, customer obsession, and growth and marketing. Its tech journey in India started in 2014 at a bungalow in Jubilee Hills, Hyderabad. 'We continue to foresee the needs over the next few years. We are doubling down on Shuttle and commute passes. And, on the delivery side, we have food delivery, which is big outside India. Also, there is the merchant ecosystem,' added Naga. India remains a critical market for Uber with more than a million drivers, after the US and Brazil.
