Agents

Uber, Airbnb, DoorDash, Booking: AI Agents Are Barely Booking Anything So Far

Jakob Steinschaden06. November 2026, 09:19

Ten million people have downloaded Meta’s shopping agent Muse, and four of them have used it to order an Uber.

That, slightly sharpened, is the state of the agent economy after this earnings season. On Uber’s third-quarter call, CFO Balaji Krishnamurthy gave analysts a number they rarely hear, as TechCrunch reports: in Halloween week, one of the strongest of the year with around 320 million trips and orders, a „grand total of four trips“ came through an AI agent. On Uber Eats, it was around 500 orders. „It is very, very early and very limited traction that we have seen so far,“ Krishnamurthy said. CEO Dara Khosrowshahi added that „every single AI system company“ had approached Uber, that he counts around eight major assistants on the market and expects more than ten. He hopes usage will grow and sees agents as a potential „net positive“ for demand. The catch: booking a ride in the app takes 50 seconds on average, reordering a favorite meal 90 seconds. There is not much time left for an agent to save.

Airbnb: „Not a Lot of Traffic, and Even Fewer Bookings“

At Airbnb it sounds similar, only with more philosophy. „We’re not seeing a lot of traffic, and even fewer bookings, from Muse and Instinct yet,“ CEO Brian Chesky said on the quarterly call, according to Business Insider. With nearly 500,000 bookings a day, the share from the two agents is „very non-material“; agent traffic peaked in early October and has not grown since. Chesky does not see a threat: „I see them kind of like Google, as an opportunity for more people to discover Airbnb.“ Today’s agents are „good at simple routine tasks,“ but travel is different: „Travel is aspirational. Discovering where to go and where to stay is part of the experience.“ 80 percent of travelers enjoy planning, 90 percent message their hosts, users typically view about a dozen listings and swipe through 25 photos per listing, and most traffic happens between 9 a.m. and 5 p.m. „These people are supposed to be working, and they’re not. We have evidence.“ Chesky does not believe many people want to offload all of that to an agent. Airbnb is nevertheless building its own travel-specific agent, due in the first half of 2027 and meant to eventually cover „every vertical in travel,“ from rental cars to flights, inside the app.

DoorDash, Booking and the Amazon Blockade

The pattern repeats across the industry. DoorDash CEO Tony Xu put orders from third-party agents such as Muse, Instinct and Fo at „maybe several hundred orders in total,“ against around three million deliveries a day, even though DoorDash has launched three AI ordering channels of its own since the summer, from the „Ask DoorDash“ chatbot to a text-to-order agent. Booking Holdings, the world’s largest travel intermediary, reported that „significantly below one percent“ of its room nights come via large language models. Around 90 percent of its rooms come from independent hotels, which an agent can hardly book directly. And Amazon, the most important retailer for any shopping agent, has blocked Muse outright, arguing that the agent never discloses that it is an AI.

This is remarkable because expectations were different. Muse hit number one in the US App Store in September; according to Meta, more than ten million people use it, many of them supposedly to shop. Instinct, the personal agent startup, was most recently valued at ten billion dollars. Meta and Walmart have proposed the Personal Agent Protocol, a standard for agents to shop at retailers, and OpenAI, Anthropic, Google and Grok all offer agents of their own. Users, however, seem to be using agents for something other than transactions: researching, summarizing, planning. In the end, a human still presses „order.“

Why the Platforms Remain Calm Anyway

For Uber, Airbnb and DoorDash, the news is good for now: the fear that agents would reduce the apps to interchangeable suppliers while Meta or OpenAI take over the customer relationship has not materialized so far. Analysts at Truist cut their price targets for Booking and Expedia in October because of Muse and conceded that the extent to which agents will affect the travel portals‘ market share remains „highly uncertain.“ Expedia, which unlike Booking has integrated with Muse, reports double-digit growth but no agent effect.

The counterposition comes from the platforms themselves, because all of them are building their own agents, and none has shut the door on third parties. Khosrowshahi explicitly hopes for growth, Chesky calls agents „another Google,“ DoorDash has three of them in its lineup. The logic: ordering a ride is too easy today for an agent to be of much help, but coordinating a trip with flight, accommodation, rental car and restaurant is not, and that is exactly where the next generation of agents comes in. Whether Muse and Instinct are still around by then, or whether the platforms keep the business with their own agents, will be decided by who knows the customers better. The four Uber rides say nothing about that yet, except that the bet is on and the stakes so far are small.