Nilay Patel Editor-in-chief of The Verge, which he co-founded in 2011, covering consumer technology, platforms and the policy around them.

“It's four. Uber fulfilled four rides from AI agents last quarter.”

The Vergecast · Tech Strategy & Big Tech · November 2026

Context

Patel was introducing earnings data on how much AI agents are actually being used for real-world tasks. Pierce called it his favorite number of the week; the hosts then noted DoorDash and Uber Eats reporting only hundreds of agent orders.

Listen to the episode → More from Nilay Patel → More Tech Strategy & Big Tech quotes →

Transcript

The Vergecast Around 40:14 into the episode

Nilay Patel

There are other financial results this week that give us insight into how well agents are doing. Uber announced how many rides it fulfilled from agents last quarter. This

David Pierce

is my favorite number of the week.

Nilay Patel

It's four. Uber fulfilled four rides from AI agents last quarter. Can

David Pierce

I just say, I put this into the X is not real life category because if you spend all of your time on X, you believe that Muse and Instinct and Dots and now Claude Duet are like mainstream products that tons of people are using all the time. Four rides.

Nilay Patel

Four rides. DoorDash's CEO, Tony Zhu, said, don't be delusional about agents because DoorDash only had a few hundred AI agent orders. Uber Eats had like 500.

David Pierce

Yeah.

Speaker names come from our own diarization. The position is estimated from where the line sits in the episode.

More from The Vergecast

“There was some news this week from Bloomberg that Apple is lowering its daily cap for engineers from $300 a day to $200 a day in how many AI tokens they can use. … Not only is this stuff not working for consumers, it's not worth the cost for businesses. And that's where all the money is. All of that revenue is business revenue. It's not regular people paying $20 a month. It's Apple paying $300 per day per engineer for people to muck around in Claude Code.” — David Pierce, The Vergecast

“We pulled this out and there were 41 measures in 10 states on the ballot this week on Tuesday. All but one of them went against data centers. Some of them were pro-data center ballot measures that failed. Some of them were anti-data center ballot measures that succeeded. All of them, but one in Hardwood, North Dakota.” — David Pierce, The Vergecast