--- title: "UBER (Trans): Building an AI-era 'everything app'" type: "Topics" locale: "en" url: "https://longbridge.com/en/topics/40489864.md" description: "Below is Dolphin Research's compilation of the $Uber Tech(UBER.US) FY26Q1 earnings call transcript. For our earnings analysis, see 'Uber: Results on track, but the Robotaxi threat lingers'. I. Key takeaways: 1) Shareholder returns: A record $3bn was returned to shareholders via buybacks this quarter. 2) Guidance: Management guides to continued growth momentum with disciplined capital allocation and a focus on sustainable profitable growth; it expects U.S. Mobility to keep accelerating through 2026..." datetime: "2026-05-06T17:52:28.000Z" locales: - [en](https://longbridge.com/en/topics/40489864.md) - [zh-CN](https://longbridge.com/zh-CN/topics/40489864.md) - [zh-HK](https://longbridge.com/zh-HK/topics/40489864.md) author: "[Dolphin Research](https://longbridge.com/en/news/dolphin.md)" --- # UBER (Trans): Building an AI-era 'everything app' **Dolphin Research compiled the following**$Uber Tech(UBER.US) **FY26 Q1 earnings call Trans; for the earnings take, cf. '**[**Uber: Results on track, Robotaxi risk lingers**](https://longbridge.com/en/topics/40489822)**'.** **I. Key highlights from the print**. **See below for a quick recap.** 1\. **Capital returns**: The company returned a record $3 bn via buybacks this quarter. This marked an all-time high for shareholder payouts. 2\. **Outlook**: Management guided to sustained topline momentum with disciplined capital allocation, focusing on profitable growth. It expects the US Mobility biz. to accelerate through full-year 2026. 3\. **Key metrics**: At constant FX, Gross Bookings rose 21% YoY; Non-GAAP EPS grew 44% YoY, outpacing Bookings by over 2x. Mobility Gross Bookings accelerated to +20% YoY with record margins, while Delivery Gross Bookings grew 23%, and Freight posted its first growth in nearly two years. 4\. **Insurance tailwinds**: **Management expects hundreds of millions of dollars in insurance cost savings in 2026**, marking the first meaningful leverage on the US Mobility insurance line since COVID. Auto insurance renewal rates improved again in Mar., and the company shifted more risk to third-party carriers. 5\. **AI investment reset**: After setting the early-2026 plan, the company raised full-year AI spend, offsetting this with slower headcount growth. The mix aims to boost productivity while protecting margins. **II. Earnings call details**. **Key remarks and Q&A follow.** **2.1 Management highlights**. **Summary points below.** 1\. **Overall performance**. **Context and drivers follow.** a. Despite macro noise from war and weather, revenue and profitability met or beat the high end of guidance. Execution remained resilient across segments. b. Monthly Active Platform Consumers grew 17%, driven by higher trip frequency and user adds. Engagement and conversion both improved. 2\. **Platform ecosystem**. **Membership and cross-use trends lead the story.** **a. Uber One surpassed 50 mn members, and there are over 10 mn drivers and couriers globally.** Scale continues to reinforce network effects. **b. The GO-GET event showcased expansion into travel and local commerce, including hotel booking and Travel Mode**. New surfaces broaden the TAM and deepen engagement. c. Cross-platform user growth is 1.5x overall user growth. Cross-use remains a key lever for LTV uplift. 3\. **Autonomous (AV) progress**. **Network and product build-out continues.** a. Uber now counts 30+ AV partners spanning Mobility and Delivery. The ecosystem approach is partner-led. b. AV Mobility trips rose more than 10x YoY, with launches targeted in up to 15 cities by year-end. Ramp plans remain on track. c. The company launched Uber Autonomous Solutions to provide tech and ops infrastructure for partners, accelerating commercialization. This lets AV firms focus on the driving stack. **2.2 Q&A**. **Selected exchanges below.** **Q: How are insurance savings trending in LA and SF, and what underpins confidence in US Mobility acceleration in 2026?** A: On insurance, as we said late last year, we expect hundreds of millions of dollars of savings on the insurance line this year, driven by strong policy work and product/tech improvements in market. In addition, **auto renewal rates that took effect in Mar. improved again, and the broader auto insurance environment is firming, allowing us to transfer more risk to third-party carriers**. Net-net, this will be the first time since COVID that the US Mobility insurance line shows real leverage. Our philosophy is to **pass those benefits back to the market**, **so riders see better Uber pricing**. We are seeing very healthy elasticity—**lower prices are translating into faster trip growth**. The California market overall is re-accelerating, and LA—historically the toughest insurance headwind—now shows better trip growth than the rest of CA and the US. We expect this to drive US acceleration in 2026, and we are more confident today than in Dec. or Jan. The setup continues to improve. **Q: With GO-GET's hotel booking, how do you shift users from on-demand to planned behavior?** A: Internally we have long debated whether we can shift from instant trips to planned behavior. That shift really started with Uber Reserve. We positioned Reserve first as an airport product, based on feedback that guaranteed early arrival reduces travel stress. Reserve has grown well ahead of the core, which itself is growing healthily, with higher margins and very strong CSAT. We now offer Reserve for both airport drop-off and pickup. The Reserve experience proves our ability to move from on-demand to planned. Travel is a natural category extension—airports are ~15% of Mobility Gross Bookings, 40% of US riders travel outside their home city, and there were over 1.5 bn trips globally outside users' home cities last year. **Our Expedia partnership brings 700k hotels live. We return most of the economics to Uber One members—10% Uber Cash back, plus 20% off at a rolling set of 10k hotels**. The focus is to drive cross-use and reward Uber One. Uber One is now 50 mn members, +50% YoY, with higher retention and 3x spend vs. non-members—our unique advantage vs. peers. We want hotels to scale to a Reserve-like business. **Q: What are the key consumer-facing tech investments, and how do personalization and recommendations show up in the experience? How far will AI Agents drive the flow?** A: **Job one remains nailing the basics—reliability and more choices in Mobility, reliability and selection in Delivery**. These are the foundations, and we believe we offer best-in-class reliability and selection globally. On top of this, AI and Agents create unique advantages. Historically, building fixed, standardized UI for everyone was limiting, as users want to interact differently with our services. AI solves that—users can ask for what they want, like 'find me a hotel', 'get me a ride to the airport', then 'get me a ride from the airport to the hotel'. The UI becomes what the user wants. This unlocks cross-use. Cross-platform users grow 1.5x faster, and Uber One members spend 3x more. We use AI to let users interact in their own way—for example, Cart Assistant builds a cart from a photo of a table or menu; drivers can ask an AI Agent about earnings, destinations, or hours and get personalized answers. We also **use LLMs for personalization and upsell. In roughly three-quarters of rides, we pre-select the destination** by predicting where you are likely headed (e.g., home after work) via AI. We can add delightful upsells—say, offering a hot coffee in a Reserve to the airport. It is very early days, but we are excited about AI's potential to drive cross-use. On cross-use, we are also investing in new entry points on both Rides and Eats. GO-GET introduced universal cross-product search. Today, nearly $15 bn of annualized Delivery Gross Bookings originate from the Mobility app, and 30% of eligible Mobility users have never tried Uber Eats. The runway is significant. **Q: How is US suburban Delivery progressing, and what drove Uber One's strong growth this quarter?** A: We are very pleased with **US suburban Delivery**, though **it is still early**. And it is not just a US suburban story—**in almost every market globally, we are expanding lower-density areas by adding drivers and merchants**. We generally see trip growth in lower-density markets running ~2x core urban areas across both Mobility and Delivery. This is a global strategy—expand selection, invest in reliability, tailor the product. For example, Reserve and Wait & Save skew higher in suburbs, and grocery is strong. In Australia, lower-density markets are roughly 2x the size of other countries on Avg. We see substantial potential. On Uber One, there is no single driver—**we now have 50 mn members, contributing 50%+ of Bookings, +50% YoY. We were at 30 mn by end-2024**, adding 20 mn within a year. First, the value proposition—pricing is comparable to peers, but we offer $0 delivery fee and Mobility credits, structurally better than any local membership. We keep adding benefits: 10% hotel cashback (a long NYC weekend can return ~$100, covering a year's fee), global benefit portability, $60+ grocery free delivery, and Member Days. Growth has persisted for a long time. We keep asking when it slows, and we have not seen signs of a slowdown. Momentum remains strong. **Q: With Waymo launching in multiple southern cities, has it impacted Uber's growth? How do you win AV partners like Zook?** A: We continue to view AV as a massive industry opportunity—another $1 tn TAM. We do not think this will be winner-take-all. Waymo is moving fast, and so are we—targeting up to 15 markets by year-end and more next year, with partners including Neuro, NVIDIA, and Zook. Our Mobility business accelerated QoQ, with an even bigger step-up in the US. We expect US Mobility to accelerate through the full year. We are not seeing any impact from Waymo's launches on our overall business. In Austin and Atlanta where Waymo operates, our performance remains strong—driver earnings are rising and more drivers are joining. In SF and LA, where Waymo has been active for a while, our category share is higher today than six months ago. Mobility is large and trends are healthy, with no signs of weakening. Why do partners sign with us? Demand. These vehicles are very expensive, and utilization on our platform is higher. Uber Autonomous Solutions lets AV partners focus on the driving system, while we handle fleet ops, data, and more. **Q: How do you think about ROI and payback? What does the Santander financing partnership mean for scaling AV fleets?** A: On returns, we run a broad, global portfolio, so there is no single ROI/payback formula. Each product either drives incremental acquisition or frequency, or improves margins. **Take our barbell strategy in Mobility: low-cost products have 75% higher frequency than core, while high-end products are growing profits at 3.5x the company rate**. Together, these lift first-time acquisition by ~25%. Paybacks vary—some are immediate, others take a few quarters. But in aggregate, the portfolio drives healthy revenue growth with annual margin expansion. On Santander—scaling to hundreds of millions of AV trips requires a full-stack ecosystem: fleet management, charging/maintenance depots, financing, and insurance. We have invested across these—e.g., Hertz for fleet ops and depot build-outs in regulator-ready markets. AV financing is unique because residual values lack a mature secondary market. Our advantage: AV utilization on our network is highly predictable, with per-vehicle trips and revenue at a premium vs. owned fleets. This supports healthy financing structures. Santander is an innovative global financier, and we are excited to partner with them. On insurance, we work with Marsh and Apollo, and AV insurance should ultimately be cheaper than human-driven coverage as safety improves. **Q: AI spend is now above the original full-year plan. Are AI capabilities augmenting or replacing existing processes? How are share trends in your top-10 Delivery and Mobility markets, and how do you drive leverage in Delivery as grocery/retail (lower-margin) grows faster?** A: AI usage is growing at an incredible pace. Uber has used AI for years—pricing, matching, routing—operating in the probabilistic real world, not a deterministic one. We now see broad adoption across Legal, Marketing, and Dev teams, creating 'superpowered' employees. Engineers do more than write code—prototyping, code review/testing, on-call SRE, migrations, and perf optimization—and AI helps across almost every build step. Commits per engineer are rising, as are lines of code, and **roughly 10% of committed code is now built by autonomous Agents** (with human review before submit). AI is an accelerator—tooling and infra spend will rise but be offset by slower headcount growth. If output per person can rise 20–100%, it is worth controlling hiring while leaning into AI. Frankly, **when we set the 2026 plan in Nov., we underestimated the impact of AI tools, and new models in Dec. pushed us to lift AI investment while trimming incremental headcount**. On Delivery competition: our Delivery position has improved materially worldwide. In the US, we continue to invest in suburban expansion. **Intl: we are on offense in Europe against DoorDash and Just Eat Takeaway**—we defended core and went on the attack, entering seven new markets; we launched in Finland this morning and are already No.1 on the App Store. In APAC, Australia, Japan, and Taiwan are strong, with Australia re-accelerating to ~30% growth off high penetration. **Q: What are the key bottlenecks to scaling AV service to 15 cities? What is driving trip growth in SF and LA, and do you see lifts from Uber One and cross-use?** A: **The biggest constraint now is simply getting more vehicles on the road**. We must ensure safety—often starting with safety drivers—and only remove them once partners pass rigorous safety evaluations, as in Abu Dhabi and Dubai. At the same time, **we need the right local dialogue as we enter each market—regulatory engagement takes time**. Regulators ask the right questions: how AVs handle power outages, school zones, interactions with firefighters, safety, congestion, and job impacts. These are critical conversations in both digital and physical AI. It takes time—scaling ops, fleet, financing, insurance, and stakeholder engagement—but it is worth it. On SF and LA trip growth, as noted on our Q4 call, incremental AV adoption is expanding the overall rideshare market. Our category share in these markets has risen over the past six months, accelerating growth. Combined with insurance-driven price improvements, we expect these markets to continue accelerating through the year. The setup looks favorable. **Q: Could personal AI Agents from Meta or Google weaken Uber's direct user relationship and abstract Uber into a middle layer?** A: First, we are building an indispensable local services platform. We operate in 70+ countries, many with both Mobility and Delivery, at a breadth unmatched by peers. Coupled with 50 mn Uber One members growing 50% YoY, users interact directly and deeply with us. We are also investing in Agents and AI tools ourselves. For example, in roughly three-quarters of Mobility trips, we can pre-fill your destination—one tap away. These are unique advantages. We are also in discussions with many third-party Agents. We have a strong negotiating position and often shape the commercial terms. I came from travel years ago and recall fears that metasearch would disintermediate OTAs. But as the sector consolidated—Expedia, Booking, Airbnb—much of the front-end value accrued to scaled platforms. We will build APIs for Apple, OpenAI, Claude, and others, and partner with those Agents. But most transactions will still happen directly on our platform. The same story played out with metasearch—even Google Maps once compared Uber and Lyft, but the experience was not as good as using the app directly. We are confident AI will enable new experiences, and most of them will happen here. **Risk disclosures and statements:**[**Dolphin Research disclaimer and general disclosure**](https://support.longbridge.global/topics/misc/dolphin-disclaimer) ### Related Stocks - [UBER.US](https://longbridge.com/en/quote/UBER.US.md) - [EXPE.US](https://longbridge.com/en/quote/EXPE.US.md)