Ride-hailing service Lyft Inc. has enlisted Anthropic to develop artificial intelligence (AI) tools for customer care for millions of users, the latest example of the two markets overlapping.
The collaboration, announced last week, builds on a previous agreement to bring Anthropic’s services to research and test new Lyft products and build software internally, the companies said.
Lyft has deployed the Claude AI model via Amazon.com Inc.’s Bedrock generative AI (GenAI) platform to help reduce the average customer service resolution time by 87% as well as to resolve thousands of customer requests daily. [Amazon has invested about $8 billion in Anthropic.]
Advances in generative AI and growth of agentic AI will help Lyft create more customer-friendly solutions, said Jason Vogrinec, executive vice president of platforms at Lyft. “Software engineering has undergone a seismic shift with the introduction of GenAI technologies. Gone are the days when humans were predominantly writing code,” he said.
The pairing of AI agents and ride-hailing services seems like a natural fit, given the scale of operations and the resources necessary to navigate millions of rides and food delivery each day. Lyft has more than 40 million riders.
Ultimately, a chatbot would conceivably save companies like Lyft customer-service costs and resolve issues quicker and more efficiently. Yet 64% of consumers still prefer human assistance, according to a Gartner survey. Customers who interact with an AI chatbot lack emotional trust, another study found.
Lyft has dabbled with AI before, though its first stab – to triage customer complaints in 2018 – met with mixed results at a time when GenAI was fairly crude.
Lyft’s move comes several months after rival, Uber Technologies Inc., said it was teaming with OpenAI on an AI assistant to answer driver questions about EVs. Since then, Uber has employed OpenAI’s new AI agent, Operator, to assist customers in automating food orders and scheduling rides. The company currently has more than 160 million riders.
