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AkhenOsiris
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The Verge:

Let me ask you about some stuff that is changing, that I think you’re going to have to make some decisions about. And honestly, it will stress some of your structure. AI is here, and it’s happening in a lot of ways. Every CEO of a service company, whether that’s TaskRabbit or Uber or whoever has come on the show, I’ve asked this question. I’ve been calling it the DoorDash problem. I should probably get the people from DoorDash on the show to actually ask them directly about this thing that I’ve been calling the DoorDash problem for six months.

But just a couple of days ago, OpenAI had DevDay, and they showed a bunch of integrations where you could ask ChatGPT to go do stuff for you, including booking an Uber. We’ve seen other agentic products. Amazon announced Alexa+, which will be able to book a flight for you and will traverse websites; it’s built into Chrome now. We’re going to traverse websites on your behalf and do stuff for you.

The backend of that, whether it’s you or Zocdoc or whoever else is, well, we have a database of information, we know where all the drivers are. If you want to buy a sandwich, we know where all the sandwiches are. And so your agent’s going to come and order a sandwich on our website, and we won’t get the customer.

We will just become a service provider to some chatbot interface, and we won’t be able to do upsells. We won’t say, “Hey, there are Dua Lipa tickets,” or whatever we’re going to say, and that’s going to shrink our margins, and we’ll just become commodity service providers. This feels like a very big problem. I’ve been asking everybody about it. Does that feel like a big problem to you?

Lyft CEO:

I mean, maybe for the reasons you just said, but I wouldn’t say it’s one of the top five that I worry about. And a big part of it is, first of all, remember what you’re doing: you’re trusting something. You’re trusting that this thing, this person, is going to come and pick you up, and they’re going to just be on time, and it’s going to be safe. And if I leave my iPhone there, I’m not going to get the thing stolen. All these different things. And it’s physical, it’s safety, and it’s real-world stuff. And so the most extreme version of what you’re saying is I go to ChatGPT and I say, “Please come pick me up.” And some rando comes to pick me up, and there’s no guarantee, there’s no service, there’s no... That would be bad. I don’t think a lot of people would be super excited about just some rando coming, picking me up in an unbranded service, and whatever it is.

So if it’s not going to be an unbranded, just a rando picking me up, then it probably has to be one of the guys who are doing existing rideshare, and that’s us. And then we’ve got all sorts of ways where I think we can compete. So we want to compete on relationships, by the way, not just on transactions. And what does that look like? That [is something] you already mentioned: you choose us, among other reasons, because you get points on your credit card, an unnamed credit card, when you do that. Well, that’s still going to be the case in the future. And so you might have a preference for us that you push through ChatGPT. If they try to disintermediate, you say, “Well, no, I actually have a preference here.” And we’re going to do a whole bunch of different things to make sure that you have a very, very strong preference for asking for us by name, not just saying, “I want to get to a place.” And then second of all, remember that-

Verge:

Wait, can you tell me what those things are? Because right now on my phone, the apps are side by side, and I open them both, and I will... if it’s within $5, I’ll pick the credit card points, but I will almost always pick the cheaper one. And I feel like an agent going off onto the web and finding the cheapest one is actually the most direct threat to your margins, to everyone’s margins.

Lyft CEO:

Read here: https://t.co/d6pypIDqEm tweet

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