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Why rides are complicated
A ride involves the interaction between driver and rider, the pickup experience, a phone left in the back seat, and payment credentials. A chat assistant that starts the request still has to settle who handles each of those when something goes wrong. A hotel booking raises the same questions: if the hotel cannot grant early check-in and needs to message the guest, the message could come back through the AI or directly from the hotel, and someone has to pay for it.
Where AI assistants fit
That is why an assistant that says get me my usual Uber does no damage to the business. Uber fulfills those requests, and 80% of people start with Uber today. The real worry is a comparison app that picks the cheapest of Uber, Lyft, and Waymo. Uber has declined the aggregation apps that asked for real-time data on every car and price in the network.
Chat versus visual
Brian Chesky drew criticism for suggesting that chat may not be the right interface for hotel booking. Some experiences are more visual and more managed, while others are purely transactional, such as a hotel close to the office at the right price.
How do travel comparison sites get their prices?
Metasearch sites such as Kayak, founded in 2004, collect fares and rates from airlines, hotels, and travel agencies through data feeds. They send the user to a partner's site to book and earn referral fees or advertising revenue. The model depends on suppliers agreeing to share their prices and availability. Skyscanner and Google Flights work in a similar way.
How do AI assistants connect to outside services?
An assistant needs a structured way to call a service, with defined inputs and outputs for actions like requesting a ride. Anthropic released the Model Context Protocol in November 2024 as an open standard for connecting AI assistants to external tools and data. Before that, each connection needed its own custom integration. The protocol exchanges JSON-RPC messages between a client and a server.
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