Uber's Product Chief Wants Fewer Things Done Better, Starting With Robotaxis and Your Bank Account
In a wide-ranging interview, Uber's top product executive talks about self-driving car partnerships, a new data business, and AI features that riders and drivers will actually feel.
Key points
- Uber Chief Product Officer Sachin Kansal outlined the company's financial-services ambitions in a 2025 interview with TechCrunch AI.
- Uber is building an operation called AV Labs to sell or license data from its rides network to other companies.
- The company's partnership with Waymo, the self-driving car unit owned by Alphabet (Google's parent), is growing more complicated as both firms compete for the same passengers.
- Kansal said Uber does not want to be "everything for everyone," a signal that the company plans to cut back on side-bets and focus on its core transport and delivery business.
Uber has spent years adding features: groceries, alcohol, medicine, even pets. Now the company's head of product says that era is ending.
Sachin Kansal, Uber's Chief Product Officer, the executive responsible for what the app looks like and what it does, told TechCrunch AI that the company is pulling back from trying to serve every possible need. The phrase he used: Uber should not be "everything for everyone."
That sounds modest for a company worth over $150 billion. But Kansal's point is strategic. Doing fewer things well beats doing many things badly.
What does this mean for people who use Uber every day?
For regular riders, the most visible changes will come from AI features baked into the app itself. Kansal described artificial intelligence showing up in ways that are practical and immediate: smarter route suggestions, better estimated arrival times, and tools that help drivers earn more steadily by predicting where demand will spike.
For drivers, that last part matters most. An algorithm that tells you a concert is ending in 20 minutes two miles away is worth real money.
On the financial side, Uber wants to become something closer to a bank for its drivers. Think instant pay, credit products, and savings tools built into the driver app. Drivers in many markets are independent contractors with no employer benefits, so Uber sees a gap it can fill, and profit from.
Then there is the Waymo question. Waymo operates driverless taxis, robotaxis with no human behind the wheel, in cities including San Francisco and Phoenix. Uber has a deal to offer Waymo rides through its own app in some markets. That partnership generates passengers for Waymo and keeps Uber relevant in the self-driving space without building its own vehicles.
But the relationship is complicated. Waymo could one day build its own app and cut Uber out entirely. Kansal did not pretend otherwise.
To prepare, Uber is standing up AV Labs, a new operation that collects and packages the enormous stream of data generated by millions of daily trips. That data, covering traffic patterns, road conditions, and rider behaviour, is valuable to any company training self-driving software. Uber plans to sell or license it.
It is a quiet pivot. Instead of just moving people, Uber becomes the company that knows how cities move, and charges others to learn from that knowledge.
The AI features, the financial products, the data business: none of them require Uber to manufacture a single vehicle. That is probably the point.
