Rideshare giant wants to use AI for delivery of hyper-personalized offers

Uber has revealed its ambition to offer hyper-personalized offers to its customers, but to do so it needs more of them to use more of its apps.

CEO Dara Khosrowshahi discussed the plan in prepared remarks [PDF] delivered ahead of the company’s Q2 results, in which he revealed that customers who use both Uber’s rideshare and delivery services “use Uber more frequently and have retention rates over 35 percent higher than single-business consumers. As a result, cross-platform consumers generate over 3x the Gross Bookings and profits than their single-business peers.”

Promotions can seem anti-consumer to some extent

Today, fewer than one in five Uber customers use both services. The company wants to improve that, then use AI to sell them more stuff.

“Larger and more sophisticated AI models are also improving our ability to encourage cross-platform activity for the right consumers at the right time—for instance, grabbing ...