Uber Technologies, Inc. (UBER) Earnings Call Transcript & Summary

[Presentation] All right. Well, thank you for the video Balaji. It's good to see you. Congrats on the new role.

Thank you. Thank you for hosting me.

Of course. Now let me first do the disclosures. Please note that all important disclosures, including personal holdings disclosures and Morgan Stanley disclosures appear on the Morgan Stanley public website at www.morganstanley.com/researchdisclosures. They are also available at the registration desk. Some of the statements made today by Uber may be considered forward-looking. These statements involve a number of risks and uncertainties that could cause actual results to differ materially. Any forward-looking statements made today by the company are based on assumptions as of today, and Uber undertakes no obligation to update them. Please refer to Uber Forms 10-K for a discussion of risk factors that may impact actual results. You've been with the company for 6 -- over 6 years, newly minted CFO. So first, let me say congratulations to you. There are a lot of factors to talk about with the company, with the core businesses, with the future of autonomous driving. So we have a lot to cover. Honored to do your first fireside as a CFO officially.

Wouldn't think another one.

It's a kind of you. So let me ask you. So let's sort of level set. You're in the new role now. How should we think about changes with capital allocation, strategic focus, the way you're thinking about sort of balancing capital returns versus investment and the overall cash flow?

Yes. So I think to level set, if you think about my role for the last few years, it has been leading our P&L for mobility and delivery. So really setting the P&L strategy and capital allocation for the 2 largest businesses that Uber has. So from that standpoint, as I think about our capital allocation direction, I think about this more as a refinement versus the reformation of what we've been doing, and you should expect that most of what we've been doing continues, right? So when I think about the capital allocation priorities for us, they fall into 5 separate pillars, and I'll just go through them quickly. The first one is that we will continue to make disciplined reinvestments into our core business. And effectively, what we're trying to do there is to ensure that we are investing to maximize the lifetime value of our cohorts, ensure that the profit dollars that are flowing through the business over time are maximized and really driving operating leverage as we are making these investments. So that's the first pillar. And we'll continue to do that. There's lots of areas we can talk about in terms of the investments we are making. Even as we do that, we are in this fortunate position where we just generated $10 billion of free cash flow, so it gives us lots of room to do other things on our capital allocation priority stack. And the #1 item that I think about there is to ensure that we are making the right-sized investments behind AVs. And for Uber, AVs are going to be a massive opportunity over the coming years. And we have this strategy here, which is designed to ensure that we are staying nimble. We're making the right investments across the ecosystem, and I'm sure we'll talk about that. Then the third thing that we are doing is ensuring that for M&A, we are holding a very high bar. We don't want to get distracted when we have the sort of opportunity we have in our core, and we are making these investments in AV. So what we are looking for are bolt-on opportunities that fit with our strategy and can accelerate our organic path, right? Good examples of that would be what we've announced in Turkey with [indiscernible] and [ Get Here ]. And recently, we acquired SpotHero on the mobility side as well. Those are the sort of acquisitions that you should be looking at us doing. Then, as we've done those things, we still are left with a lot of cash to ensure that we continue to return capital to shareholders. And last year, we returned more than [ $6 million ]. We continue to remain on that kind of a footing for this year. The refinement that you should look for is that we will look at dislocations in our stock, and when we find those opportunities, we'll be aggressive. And we are not looking for it to be a steady every quarter kind of a buyback. And I said this on the earnings call as well. We think our stock is dislocated right now, and we are being aggressive, right? And then the final piece there then is we're doing all of these things while retaining our investment-grade rating. We will maintain financial policies and liquidity that keep us in that place and allow us to expand on our strategy.

Great. There's a lot to dig into there. Maybe I'll start with, number one, on sort of investing in the core the cohort sort of the -- a lot of the positive traction kind of core business. Part of that has been cross-platform users. Maybe remind us again, what are you seeing in cross-platform spend versus non-cross platform? How big is it now? And how do you think about the next couple of years continuing to get a higher percentage of your users engaging a cross-platform activity?

Yes. So when we talk about cross-platform, what we're talking about is if we acquire a consumer from 1 of our services, whether it's mobility or delivery or within delivery, food delivery or grocery and retail, we introduced them to the other that Uber has to offer. And consumers, then, when they start engaging across those multiple services, they tend to become quite valuable to Uber. And the quantification we've talked about previously is consumers engaging a cross platform tend to drive 3x as much gross bookings and profits than those who engage on only 1 side of the platform. I think if you look at grocery and retail as another example, grocery and retail consumers tend to have frequency that's 3x as high as consumers who are engaging only on food delivery, right? So the penetration rates here are quite early, though, even though the opportunity is great. All right. It's not working. I was wondering why I was having to shout. So I think as you think about the penetration rate here, it's still quite early. And for our overall cross-platform penetration, we're just at 20% of our MAPCs who are engaging across the platform. On something like grocery and retail, it's less than 10% of our delivery -- first-time consumers who are engaging on the grocery and retail side. So there's a lot of runway here for us to do more work. So the ways we're going about this are: first, we are ensuring that our services are designed to attract consumers to the other side of the house, right? So if you go to your Uber, UberEats app now, you see a top tab that gives you optionality to go to the other side. We now have a universal search. So if you're on the Uber app, you're searching for a ride to the restaurant, we may surface up delivery to that restaurant as well not because we wanted to deter you from going to the restaurant, but it's a good recall for you that UberEats can bring that food to you as well in the future, right? So things of that sort of the first way we are going there. The second thing we've been doing is personalization and using machine learning to ensure that based on time of day, season, location, whether you're traveling or you're at home, we are ensuring that we can surface up different kinds of solutions to you. And then the third thing we're doing is work on membership as well as the ecosystem, where from a membership standpoint, for instance, we are now introducing things like Quest, where we may give you a quest to say do 2 food delivery orders, one grocery and retail order and take 1 trip and you will get this reward, right? So things of that nature or we're working with third-party players like Rakuten to bring in their rewards program to pair up with our cross-platform efforts as well. And all of that goes towards driving that penetration higher for us.

That's helpful. Maybe in the U.S. on this cross-platform opportunity. Talk to us about sort of the still existing efforts to bring on more supply, nonrestaurant supply grocery stores and retailers. What have you done? And how do you think about continuing to increase the non-restaurant supply?

Yes, it's a great question and a big area of focus for us right now. The way I think about where growth trend retail as a category is I like to think about this as a journey where food delivery was in 2019 or 2020, right? So it's quite early. And at that point of time, just for context, our food delivery business was doing about $14 billion of gross bookings. Our grocery and retail business right now is $12 billion, $13 billion. And now, of course, our overall business is near $100 billion. So clearly, the expansion that came after that, we've all seen and DoorDash and others have grown in that period as well. So what we are seeing with grocery and retail is for grocery specifically, there are a set of large merchants across the country for whom we want to bring a service that's incremental to them, right? And really, what we've seen is our top-up use cases where consumers are adding on another order on top of their existing core of online food delivery order or they're coming to us because they forgot something they needed on an on-demand basis. Those sort of things tend to be quite incremental to the grocers and they're engaging with us on that. And then the retailers are the broad local commerce category where they have been looking for a way to access consumers and think about the categories such as best supplies, home goods, beauty, pharmaceuticals, alcohol, et cetera. These are all individually very large categories, but there is a very long tail of merchants. City by city, you have to acquire them. To me, the analogy here is that the grocers are like the large QSRs that we acquired for food delivery, and then the retailers are like the large scale of SMBs that we acquired on the food delivery side. And that's kind of the economic split that we are also beginning to see here. And the more supply and selection we add here, the more reason we give consumers to keep coming back to us, and that's really the goal for us over time.

Got it. There's a lot going on in the core, but we must talk about AV. As you know, there's a little bit of an autonomous debate going on around the industry and the stock. So maybe let me ask you one just sort of to table set on AV. Talk to us about now versus 1 year ago. What has surprised you most about how the autonomous vehicle industry has evolved? And what do you think is the most misunderstood part by investors and all the discussions you have about Uber's position in this industry?

Yes. So let me start with what we said a year ago and how that has played out. And I would say it has actually held up quite well. A year ago, we said autonomous technology is beginning to mature, and it's beginning to get to the prime time of deployment across many markets, but commercialization is going to take a lot. And the 4 key reasons why we thought commercialization has hurdles in front of it were software needs to be super human safe. Some players have met that hurdle, not everyone. OEMs need to produce cars, and they need to do it at a cost point that makes sense. And they need to do it at a scale that will allow for the fixed cost to be absorbed. Third, you need to put fixed infrastructure on the ground. This is not a deployment like Uber's early days where we just had to sign up drivers and we were off to the races. You actually have to build out deployments on the ground as well. And then the fourth piece is regulations are a barrier for the deployment curve here as well because the more you think about where this category is going, it's not going to be a straight line. There will be ups and downs on whether regulatory approvals come through or right? All of those factors have actually held up quite well through the last year. And where we've been surprised positively is that what we have seen so far has proved to be that AVs are incremental to the ride-hailing category. It has gone back to a core hypothesis behind ridesharing that this is a supply-driven category. The more supply you add to the market, the more the category grows. And we've seen that now coming through in various deployments, including an SF where AVs are not even on Uber or Lyft's network. The category has still expanded, and this market has been growing faster than the rest of the U.S. It has accelerated versus 2024 and 2025. And then in markets where we have deployed AVs in our network, we have clearly seen that it has not only been incremental to our growth, but we are demonstrating the value of our hybrid network with both high utilization to our partners and better consumer experiences, right? We talked about Austin and Atlanta showing 30% higher utilization, 25% faster ETAs and lower consumer side prices than 1P deployments and all of that has been quite positive for us in action because a year ago. It was all a hypothesis, right? So I think where we sit now, the most misunderstood piece for investors, as you pose the question, I think is those gating factors. This is not a straight-line growth. And the more time passes, the more conviction we gain that the strategy on which we have been playing, which is multiple players getting to the finish line of L4 deployment, that's beginning to bear out as we go. And we are beginning to see players like NVIDIA also enter the space, which incrementally drives further adoption over time. So I think just from -- the last point I'll make on this is from a capital availability standpoint as well, we have started seeing the capital entering the space accelerate. Setting aside Waymo, all of our other partners have raised about $7 billion in the last 18 to 24 months. And in the last month or so, you've already seen that accelerate where we've raised $1.5 billion, while we had a commitment for $1 billion, right? So this is only getting faster and faster as we go forward.

Okay. Great. I want to give you the opportunity to sort of do the point, counterpoint on a couple of common AV bear cases that I hear in investor discussions. So the first 1 is there are some investors who say, over the long term, and that could be 10 years away, Uber faces a potential supplier concentration risk, where we're moving from millions of drivers down to 5, 6, 7 different networks that, that will run all the cars basically in an AV world, and that leads the in-period unit economics. What is your response to that and That's why that's not a long-term concern?

Yes. So I think, again, it goes back to the fundamental nature of ride hailing, which is more supply we add to this business, the better the category becomes, right? So we have to start there first and foremost, because the more supply you're adding, the reason this category benefits from that is because you're adding more units to a market. Consumers have lesser and lesser reason to look elsewhere. It's more reliable. It's a cheaper service. And as you go through that kind of motion, the incrementality of AVs to ride hailing becomes clearer and clearer, right? So that's the point -- the first point you have to think through. The second thing I'd say here is what tends to be true for winner take all or winner take most kind of deployments is that they tend to have a very hockey stick inflection curve and those gating factors we just talked about ensure that this is going to grow at a slower rate than what the fundamental nature of a winner take all deployment is. And I think the way I think about this in my mind is the fastest-growing EV deployments right now are at best tripling their volumes year-on-year. In the early years of Uber's deployment, for the first 6 or 7 years, Uber almost 9 to 10x-ed its volumes every year, right? That was the exponential curve, which we were on and where AVs are right now. Then the third factor you have to think through here is, again, when you think about the OEMs incentive curve here, which again, you have to remember, OEMs have to build these cars, OEMs don't want to be single source either, right? And from their standpoint, there's a lot of geopolitical consideration here as well, which ensure that there will be an effort to bring up a lot of local champions behind the OEMs, right? So when you think about a player like Wave, for instance, there's going to be a European effort for players like Wave to come through on the other side. If you think about an OEM -- let's pick a Hyundai, they are going to have pretty low incentive to have only one software player serving them and them being fully beholden to them, right? So that's another reason why that becomes a challenge. From our perspective, when we think through this deployment curve over the next few years, once we start getting conviction that software is going to hit the mark and it's going to get to that L4 deployment with superhuman safety, our efforts start shifting to a couple of other priorities. The first one is securing OEM supply, right? We need to ensure that any of our partners who can deliver that kind of software have enough scale volumes coming to them, and then that volume can get deployed on Uber's network. And then the other thing we have to do is to ensure that we are bringing AB in structure on the ground. And for instance, for our 2027 deployments, we're already scouting sites across our footprint. We already have about 50 different sites that we are beginning to get into leasing conversations, and those deployments will start once we have the software there.

Got it. Okay. That answered the winner take most bear case or [indiscernible], I often get as well. So I want to ask you about the international AV offering. I feel like this is something that is almost underappreciated sometimes. I know you hosted a group in the Middle East last week and sort of showed some of the Baidu and the WeRide partnerships. Maybe walk us through some of the differences in the international landscape, what you can share on the cost of the vehicles, how your positioning there is a lot different than it is in the U.S.

Yes. So I think what we are seeing in our international markets is already -- are sort of thesis proving out. And as you think about what we have already talked to you about in terms of our commitments here, we want to ensure that by 2029, Uber has the largest AV deployment globally, and we'll be facilitating the more trips than anyone else. And as a market towards that, by the end of this year, we want to have up to 15 cities where AV deployments are going up on Uber's network, and roughly half of them will be in international markets. So what we're seeing in those international markets right now because we have 3 distinct partners who are already capable of deploying AVs on our network, which is Baidu, WeRide and Pony, we are beginning to see the scenarios where you start seeing a variety of supply coming. So in Abu Dhabi, for instance, we already have VR with driver Art solution. In Dubai, we'll likely have players like both WeRide and Baidu going on our network and bringing their services to the market. And in that kind of a world, you don't have a lot of conflict where your partners may be thinking about, should I go 1P, should I go 3P. They're trying to get to speed to market and the fastest way to get that kind of an outcome is to work with Uber and also work through all of these solutions we bring, both in terms of our fleet partnerships as well as the Uber Autonomous Solutions kind of stack that you just saw the video right before our chat. We are beginning to see that kind of a theme play out there. From a cost standpoint, the Chinese partners we're working with are at a price point for their hardware and software, which is better than anything we are seeing anywhere. So they will certainly have an advantage there. And the fact that they don't have philosophical debates about whether they want to do 1P versus 3P, puts them in a place where they're maximizing revenues against the lowest cost structure, and that just gives them a leg up in how quickly they can ramp up.

Great. Good color. Let's come back to the core in the U.S. because there's -- the overall business is being run really well. And one of the shining points has been the dense -- the less dense or the more sparsely populated market. I think you've talked about them growing 1.5x faster than the denser market. Maybe walk us through what has driven that faster growth. And how do you think about sort of investing to keep that more sparse market growth moving quicker through the overall P&L?

Yes. So what I would say there is that it has been a function of our product innovation as well over the years, right? Historically, the reason we've not been able to serve sparser markets is that reliability in those markets is much worse. And over the years, we were able to address the reliability challenge on 2 dimensions. First, we introduced reserve which, as a consumer, allows you to trade for reliability in exchange for price. Reserve is more premium, you pay a price and get the reliability that brings you. And then at the same time, we were also able to launch and expand a product like Wait & Save, which gives you the opposite choice. You get reliability in exchange for time, right? You're making a trade-off on the time dimension versus price. So as we've done that, and we have gotten better about things like taxi integrations because historically, again, we didn't have the 3P integration available. In many markets, taxi is the best way to go expansion. All of that has allowed us to go into these sparser markets and serve consumer needs in a way we couldn't earlier. So what we're beginning to see now is, today, when you think about the disclosure we gave on earnings where trips happening within our top 20 markets in the U.S. represent about 30% of our gross bookings, but only 25% of U.S. mobility EBITDA, that just is a function of our non-top 20 markets growing faster, getting to a profitability position that's better than our top 20 markets and continuing to grow from there, right? It's not at mature state margins either. And the further out you go on that density quartile, the better that story becomes for us, and we feel that the runway here is very, very long. And this is not just a U.S. story. We see similar sort of themes in Europe and markets like Lat Am as well, where we are expanding with our motor product, which is today 15% of first trips in Brazil and 90% of these Moto consumers migrate from Moto to UberX and other Uber products, which are quite profitable for us as well, so lots of runway with the product and geographical expansion we are driving here.

If we think about sort of pairing the sparse market mobility strategy with the cross-pollination strategy into Eats. How far away are you being able to say, look, we're making progress in the sparse markets on rides. Now we're going to really sort of press more into the delivery and the food and everything else that '27 dynamic, and '26. When can that investment happen?

Yes. So it's definitely something we think about. But before we start pressing on those kind of investments, we have to ensure that the quality of our product is excellent on it, right? And for delivery, the way to measure that is do we have the right kind of selection in every market. So if you're in a sparse market, we cannot just show you McDonald's, Subway, Starbucks and hope where consumers to be sticking to us because we do need to bring you the local champions in that market, and we have to get you the best selection from that town or city. So there's still selection work that we're doing, right? Then, you have to ensure that the way your courier motion is in that market is also different, right? In dense markets, you can get to couriers on a very hands-off basis. They can come in and out of the system whenever they like because there's enough density, whereas in sparser markets, you need to allow scheduling, you need to be able to tell couriers when to log on when they can expect to find business, right? So there's work that's happening on that side of the marketplace as well. Suffice to say, it's not lost on us. It's definitely a part of our plan, but we need to ensure that the product quality on both sides is good before we start making that investment. Otherwise, we're not getting the returns we expect there.

Got it. Managing [ occurred ] that was very complicated despite the AI bear cases that we may have heard the last couple of weeks. People forget someone actually has to deliver that food. Delivery has been doing well. I think you've accelerated from high-teens growth in the first quarter to mid-20s growth by 4Q. What can you call out as sort of having been the drivers of that acceleration over the course of the last 4 quarters?

Yes. So definitely a very good story for us here. We -- when we look at our Q4 performance for delivery, the vast majority of that growth is coming from audience expansion still. In fact, Q4 2025 was our strongest MAPC growth quarter for 4 years, right? So it's been an accelerating story, and we are at a spot where we are continuing to accelerate from. And the way to think through that is when you look at the cohort behavior, 2025 cohort for us from a retention and engagement standpoint is better than our previous years. So we've been just seeing better and better traction with the consumers we've been acquiring. What you're seeing underneath that is our selection quality has been improving. We've been making a lot of investments in affordability initiatives. And then from a reliability and timeliness standpoint as well, our product quality has improved quite a bit. And as you do -- as you hit the mile mark on all of those dimensions, the consumer acceptance of your product is going to be better than it was previously, right? So that's the first piece. The second thing that we are seeing is membership adoption has been quite spectacular for us, right? We talked about 46 million members as of the last quarter, still growing over 50%. It's the largest membership program of its kind in our category. And really, what you're seeing with that is the stickiness, everything that I was talking about from the previous point, that magnifies even more for the consumers who are members and paying to engage with our platform. The third thing you're seeing is, from a category position standpoint as well, we're in a very, very good spot. So U.S., our category position is relatively stable. It's a great category where both Uber Eats and DoorDash are benefiting from the expansion of the category. But outside the U.S., we have continued to gain share even though our position is 2 to 3x as large as the next player in the market. And I'm talking about large markets like Canada, France, Australia, Japan, Taiwan, Turkey, right, all of which we are now at a strong #1 position and the U.K. as well, we are in a good #1 position now. So from a category position standpoint, there's a lot of momentum that we're getting there. And the final point is as you think about the relative presence of our business, mobility is in about 75 countries, delivery is in only about 32, 33 countries at this point. So there's more of a geographical expansion story as well here, which you will see us continue on as we go from here.

And part of the geographic expansion, I think there was an article or if you guys confirmed or sort of expanding some of the markets throughout Europe with food delivery to come. But maybe let's talk a little bit about European food delivery because with Dash, having acquired Roo, there's a lot of discussion about France and the U.K., where you do have really strong businesses. How do you think about sort of the investments in France and the U.K. and just Europe more generally, delivery side?

Yes. So we did announce an expansion into the Nordics. And if you think about the Nordics markets, we already have a mobility business there, but we didn't have a delivery business, and we announced an expansion there, which is consistent with the point I was making. We will look for markets where we think there's a potential for us to bring a differentiated solution, and we benefit from a baseline of our mobility consumer base. So that fits into that kind of a mold. But stepping back into the broader European question of what we see. From our standpoint, we feel pretty good about the strategy we've been executing. We have gone into most of the European markets with a mindset of not leaving any part of the continent underpenetrated. So when you think about the U.K. or France, for instance, we are not in London or Paris business. We have expanded into most of the non-London, non-Paris markets in those countries. We've also leaned into grocery and retail. In the U.K., we are now the clear #1 player from a grocery and retail standpoint. And then membership for us has been a very strong adoption story there as well. So as we sit here, what we are seeing is actually opportunities because when your competitors are replatforming and introducing disruption for their own stack, that creates an opportunity for us to engage with merchants who are looking for certainty that their business doesn't get disrupted. And in markets like London, for instance, we are now seeing an opportunity to bring on selection, which was exclusive to our competitor. And in markets like France, of course, we already have a clear #1 position the way just pressing home the advantage of that, right? So broadly, a healthy story. And then the final market that I'll call out, which is also going to be interesting is Germany, where Jet has a market-leading position. We are now the clear #2 player, and Volt has not made as much progress as us. And that market we continue to lean into. It's a very strong market for our mobility business. We have a #1 position there. It's a top 10 mobility market. So we'll continue to invest in Germany as well.

Okay. Let me ask you one about Gen AI and sort of the GPU-enabled machine learning. Can you give us some examples of things you're doing now with either GenAI or GPU machine learning that you maybe weren't doing 2 years ago. And anything you can quantify on early signal on ROIC of these new capabilities?

Yes. So I think, generally, if you just step back and think about the complexity of our marketplace, it has always been driven by machine learning. And as we have gone into this world of GenAI and more and more powerful GPUs, what it has allowed us to do is to think about ways to engage whether that's incremental source of compute to drive the throughput of our marketplace. A great example where I would start is just thinking about grocery and retail, right? When you go from mobility to food delivery, it's already from a compute standpoint, quite intensive. But when you go from food delivery, where the menu may have a certain number of SKUs, to grocery and retail, where the SKU count just explodes exponentially compute needs quite dramatically changed right? So where we are making an investment there, first and foremost, is we are making more of an investment in GPU resourcing to ensure that our marketplace is well supported, right? And that will be a continued theme. That will continue for many, many years to come. And I think when Jensen talks about that, we see that in action in our business, right? So that's the first piece from an infrastructure standpoint that we think about. Then as you think through the general use cases that most organizations are talking about, most of them are true for us as well, right? Developer productivity is the first area we are looking at. Dara recently talked about 90% of our coders using some sort of coding tools. That has been a very positive inflection for us over the last year. And we're beginning to see that every few months, there's a step function change in how that engagement is happening and where there's an incremental productivity lift that we are seeing there. The second piece from a customer support standpoint, again, we are leveraging more of the GenAI tools there. We are at a $15 billion-plus trip run rate, and each of our trips has at least 2 participants. So the number of customer support interactions we're looking at as well is very large. Again, so this, I think, for us, will be a multiyear cost savings and better customer support experience opportunity. And then finally, from a customer experience standpoint itself, which is where you start thinking about the agentic use cases, we're being very front-footed. We are engaging with the leading labs like OpenAI, et cetera, to be pilot customers to evaluate what opportunities exist here. And ultimately, our goal is to ensure that we're meeting consumers where they are, and we're looking for incrementality of those engagements for us. And if it's incremental, we'll go deeper.

And then agentic point and there's a lot of discussion about sort of the big horizontal agents potentially wedging themselves between the consumer and Uber and others, which could lead to the loss of the customer, the loss of the high-margin ad business? Just sort of philosophically, what are you doing to sort of ensure that you don't lose the customer and you don't lose the unit economics?

Yes. So I think it just glosses over the complexity of the marketplaces that we operate, right? First, if you think about the mobility business, what consumers are looking for are -- is reliability, price and safety. They are engaging with our service, on average, 6 times a month. And really, if you go back to the olden days of where Uber and Lyft were surfaced up on Google Maps, and this question used to come up even then, what we saw was consumers just don't behave that way. They don't engage with our service through a third party because there's a price comparison point available to them. They're looking for all 3 of those things to be met, not just price. Delivery is even more complex. And what you are looking at from a third-party surface standpoint is, yes, it can bring you selection. But when consumers are looking for delivery to their houses, they're hungry. They want that delivery to come to them in their time line that's been promised to them. They need it hot. They want all the items to be present. And if something goes wrong, they want resolution quickly as well. And by the way, the same sort of complexity exists on the courier side. It exists on the merchant side. And all of that is quite -- from a cost deployment standpoint, it's quite immaterial to most consumers in the grand scheme of things. And I think that's really where you start going into the world of why would you want to do that when this is a really easy way for you to engage anywhere. So I think, again, it's not to dismiss the potential of agentic commerce here. We will certainly see some usage and we will engage and see where it makes sense. But it's not a binary flip where it's either this or that.

I know we have an extra minute. I just want to give you an opportunity as well to sort of talk about one of the other budding disruptive bear cases on autonomous delivery, drones, droids, Waymos, et cetera. So one, remind us what Uber is doing on the different modalities of autonomous food delivery? And how do you think about just some of the challenges of delivering across all the different end points?

Yes. I mean I think on that front, we're in a pretty good spot. We already have over 1,000 delivery bots on our network in more than 10 cities. We are working with about 7 partners in that ecosystem. It spans both sidewalk robots and drones. And what we are seeing right now is sidewalk robots have potential, but they come with their own friction, right? You are -- if you're a merchant or a consumer, you're now used to seeing a courier show up to your counter, pick up the order and drop it off at your doorstep whereas sidewalk robots have friction on both ends and you have to go out and meet the bot. Drones, on the other hand, can be faster. They can cover larger radius and they can potentially even drop off the package in your backyard. So there's a broader use case there. I think we are going to keep exploring and see where this goes. The good news is that economics of these deployments is already quite attractive for us. It's interesting for us to be able to deploy these while not having to make a deep investment and they're learning as we go. Long term, no question in our mind that drones and bots will play a much bigger role in delivery, but there's still some things to be ironed out.

Great. All right. Well, thank you so much for the time. Congrats on the new role. Talk to you soon.

Thank you.