If your company isn’t crowing about AI in 2025, investors aren’t interested in looking at you. That could be why Uber Eats has announced that it will include artificial intelligence features in its app.
Don’t get too dismayed — the features aren’t for you. Yet. Instead, restaurants and other sellers on the app will have an AI suite in the backend to help them “analyze customer reviews, auto-fill menu descriptions, and enhance food photos.” You know, stuff you can do already without setting fire to the planet.
Uber Eats at the AI trough
The new AI features will let food purveyors compile reviews and feedback without all that tedious reading, a move that certainly won’t backfire on anyone.** Menu descriptions can also be automatically generated, though it’s not explained how this will work. Will the AI inspect a dish and suggest a description, or is some other mechanism in mind? However it works, it should “[help] customers feel confident in their choices.”***
The other AI function coming to Uber Eats? Fixing up dodgy images of meals in the app’s menu. This will use AI to “detect and enhance low-quality food images – improving lighting, resolution, framing, and plating.” This is being pitched as “[helping] restaurants showcase their dishes more accurately”, but it could just as easily lead end-users to order an item that looks nothing like that in real life. Surely a restaurant owner wouldn’t do something that shady?****
Uber Eats doesn’t display quite as much faith in that last function as perhaps it should. The app is also getting a user content upgrade that will permit customers to snap and upload pictures of meals they’re especially pleased with. This isn’t just old-school Instagramming into the void, however. Customers in the U.S., Canada, Mexico, and the UK stand to be rewarded with UberCash if restaurants select their image to showcase the purchased dish. You probably won’t be able to use it to complain about the driver delivering your pizza upside down.
Finally, a live chat between merchants and customers is also coming to the app, hopefully sorting out any issues before a meal is dispatched to your home. South Africans will have to wait for these upgrades, of course, since they’re set to go live in larger markets first. Now if Uber Eats could just do something about the food arriving cold…
*No, it won’t.
**Yes, it will.
***Sure it will.
****Yes, they would.
