Uber has spent the last year quietly moving beyond the two businesses most people associate it with. There’s ride-hailing, of course, and delivery, but spend time on the app and you’ll now find Expedia-powered hotel bookings, “buy for me” concierge features, and boat rentals in Europe.

Under the hood, so to speak, there’s a lot going on too. Think debit cards for drivers, a data-tagging sideline for these same earners looking to make more money, and a six-month-old business unit called AV Labs, which is developing a fleet of sensor-equipped vehicles that is separate from Uber’s regular network of drivers and designed to collect increasing amounts of driving data. Uber frames the initiative as a way to strengthen its relationships with autonomous vehicle partners, several of which it also has an equity stake in, but it sure seems like a hedge, too. Uber competes directly with some of those same partners, including Waymo, and owning the data layer gives Uber some leverage and optionality.

It remains an open question whether Uber will become a full-fledged “everything app,” similar to some Asian super apps like Grab. But in this conversation, Uber chief product officer Sachin Kansal explains to TechCrunch the company’s financial services ambitions, its increasingly complicated relationship with Waymo, its new AV Labs data operation, and how AI is starting to show up in ways that users and drivers will really notice.

This interview has been edited for length and clarity.

TC: Earlier this year you introduced hotels, boat rentals and more commercial functions. How was that list made and what didn’t make the cut?

SK: Every year, our teams obviously build a lot of things, and we decided that a part of them is worth sharing with the world on the biggest stage. This year the theme we gravitated towards was really travel. In reality, 1.5 billion trips on the Uber platform each year occur outside of a user’s home city, so we know that traveling is something that is a very common use case for Uber users. Our main announcement this time was to introduce hotels to Uber as a partnership with Expedia. But traveling is much more than that: you need transportation to get from the airport to the hotel and you need food. Many of our users told us that many of them had stopped using room service and were just using the Uber Eats app. With “Shop for Me,” the goal was to allow you to shop at any local store, even if that store is not available on Uber Eats with the entire catalog. In my opinion, traveling really is the third leg of the stool: we had trips, then we added meals, and now we’re adding trips.

Is Uber moving toward offering its own financial services, like “everything apps” do in Asia?

For us, financial services encompass multiple different entities: consumers, but also drivers, couriers and merchants. Today we have multiple products focused mainly on drivers and couriers, where we have what we call the Uber Pro card, which they can use as a debit card and transfer all their earnings. We’re starting to experiment with some of those products for merchants in certain parts of the world right now. As far as consumers are concerned, we’ll see if this makes sense for us in the long term. There is currently a currency that consumers can use (we call them Uber credits) and this ties into our membership program. At hotels, for example, members get 10% cash back on a $1,000 transaction—that’s $100 back as a credit you can then use on travel and dining.

Would Uber ever offer its own buy now, pay later product?

I’m not sure, because we want to make sure that the experts do what the experts do. We have already announced partnerships with others in the industry who already provide that service, so that at checkout you have the ability to do so. In terms of our overall product strategy, we’re not trying to be everything to everyone.

For boat rentals in Europe, tapping the tab takes users to a partner’s own booking stream instead of paying within Uber. Is that transfer model a model for what is to come?

There are definitely some cases, especially when we are doing something new, where we trust our partners, because a two-way integration takes a long time and in some cases it is good that we try it before integrating deeply. In the case of Expedia, we decided it makes sense to do a deep integration: we created the entire user interface ourselves in partnership with Expedia. But in some cases it may make sense for us to hand over the rest of the expertise to the experts in that field and, if we get great traction, we can always integrate them deeply.

Its Uber One membership product now has 51 million members and accounts for about half of bookings. Do you have data to show that cross-selling actually works and that a delivery user then starts taking more trips?

As for delivery, it takes two to three orders to cover the monthly fee you pay. As members become accustomed to the program, their frequency increases within the line of business they are already using. And it’s also driving greater use of the other sides of the business: we’re seeing mobility-only people starting to use delivery as well, and delivery-only people starting to use mobility as well.

Delivery has been one of the most difficult technology businesses to make profitable. Is Uber Eats still turning to ridesharing to stay healthy?

During the early years of Uber Eats it was still not profitable, but over the last few quarters, Uber Eats has independently been a profitable business for us and has generated a lot of profits.

A story I wrote this spring featured Uber as unexpectedly more direct competition with Airbnb, which now offers airport shuttles through a partner. Do you see it like that? who are they you What are you most focused on?

There is no shortage of competitors: Lyft in the US, Didi and 99 in Latin America, Bolt, Ola worldwide and, at the time of delivery, DoorDash, Delivery Hero. But I only spend a very small percentage of my time thinking about that. The biggest percentage of my time, or what keeps me up at night, is providing our users with all the value we can provide.

You recently canceled the Waymo pilot in Phoenix while scaling elsewhere. How can you maintain consistency of experience when you partner with and, in some cities, compete with the same provider?

Phoenix was the first city we launched in with Waymo, with about a dozen cars, but our scale launches have been in Austin and Atlanta, where we have hundreds of cars with them. When we recently watched the Phoenix pilot, we mutually decided that it doesn’t make sense for us to continue. Waymo is a great partner of ours, but in many cities they are also a competitor. We are not in the race to be an L4 autonomy provider; What we’re focusing on is setting up the race tracks so we can work with multiple players. We believe in the hybrid network, of both human drivers and autonomous vehicles in the same city, because it allows us to balance supply and demand.

Regarding AV Labs, what can Uber offer its autonomy partners that they don’t already have?

We will equip hundreds of cars with sensors, deployed through our fleet partners, and through them we will collect millions of miles of driving data. That really helps with the long tail problem – you want to see all edge cases, not just the P95, P99 level. Beyond the data itself, our 10 million workers have a lot of knowledge about how pickups and returns work. We handle 25 million lost items every year. How do you handle that operationally in the world of autonomy? That’s the kind of operational experience we can bring to the table.

Is Uber selling driver and passenger data to Gen AI companies?

I would divide this into two parts. In terms of AI Generation companies, we can tag data for them using our revenue base or through audio collection, and yes, we have business relationships with them and we are selling it to them; that’s a part of the business that’s new, and we’re extremely optimistic about it. AV Labs is independent and we’re still figuring out those models for sharing that data with partners. It’s a little early.

Do drivers record conversations with passengers for this data work?

No, no, no. I want to be very clear: no conversations are recorded as part of that while they are traveling. When they are not traveling, they do not drive, they do not make deliveries, they simply talk or listen to a fragment of audio and transcribe it. By the way, they get paid to do that.

Where has AI actually appeared in a way that a passenger or driver would notice?

If you are a worker on our platform, we have an income assistant; The number one question on their mind is how can I make more money, and you’ll tell them, look, there’s actually plenty of light in the South Bay, but you might want to go five miles away where there’s a lot of demand. On the Eats side, there is a shopping cart assistant where you can say “I want milk, eggs, bread” and it creates the cart very quickly. And when traveling, you can use your voice to request a ride: say “I’m looking for transportation to the airport, I have six pieces of luggage, six people.”

So is a fully agent Uber (“plan and book my entire trip”) on the horizon?

I can’t put a date on it and I can’t tell you exactly what the feature set will be, but I think AI will be a big enabler of that, where I can leave the complexity to the platform and just tell an agent what exactly I want. Easier said than done: We want to make sure we’re not simply checking a box by sending an agent that may not work as well.

As a CPO, how do you personally prioritize with so many ideas going on?

I would say I spend 70% to 80% of my time making sure our existing products, or products we’re about to launch, are as robust as possible. All new ideas are like shiny objects: if you have 100 ideas, maybe five of them are good, and those five need a lot of cultivation and convincing. So probably 20% of the time is spent on new ideas; I even, by the way, go out, drive and deliver, just to see our product from the other side firsthand.