Ride-Hail Giant Lyft is partnering with AI startup humanity to build an AI assistant that handles the initial intakes of both rider and driver customer service inquiries.
This is the first stage of a broader collaboration between the two companies to use Anthropic’s services to investigate and test new LYFT products and build software internally.
The partnership comes four months after Uber announced a similar partnership with Openai to launch an AI-powered assistant that can answer driver questions about EVS. More recently, Uber announced a collaboration called Openai’s new AI agent, operator-called, to help customers automate food orders and scheduling rides.
According to humanity, Lyft quietly incorporated Claude, a family of humanity’s large language models, into its customer care AI assistants in late 2024 via Amazon Bedrock. Provides answers to common support issues and redirects customers to human experts for more complex tasks.
This is not Lyft’s first time with an AI chatbot. The company first introduced it in 2018 to help triage customer complaints. But as anyone who has had to resort to chatbots can tell you, old school chatbots are limited and infuriating. Claude is known for his human-like reactions and can make all the difference for customers who are looking to solve their problems.
Or maybe it’s another chatbot that allows businesses to spend less money on customer service by dumping human assistants who can actually solve problems faster. Despite the promise of generative AI, most people still don’t want to talk to the bot when there’s a problem to solve. A recent Gartner survey found that 64% of customers do not use AI for customer service. Another study found that seeing customers talking to AI chatbots reduce emotional trust.
Still, Lyft says its Claude-equipped assistants are working, reducing average customer service resolution time by 87% and resolved thousands of customer requests every day. A Lyft spokesman said the issue was marked as resolved when the customer answered “Yes” to the chatbot question “Did you solve the problem?”
Lyft’s non-exclusive partnership with Anthropic goes beyond chatbots. As part of the transaction, humanity will provide training and education to Lyft engineers and teach them how to incorporate AI companies’ tools into their workflows.
Lyft uses AI to power the entire platform. From accurate ETA acquisition and route optimization to selecting the right destination and adjusting rider pickup. Humanity’s tools can help improve Lyft’s services, allowing them to compete better with their main rival Uber.
“Software engineering has undergone earthquake changes with the introduction of Genai Technologies,” said Jason Vogrinec, executive vice president of Lyft’s platform, in a statement. “LLM’s commitments, particularly Claude and Agenti c AI, etc. With our key coding models, we are working to revolutionize our engineering organizations and build gaming change products for our customers more effectively.”
Humanity also implements “exclusive early access programs” that allow certain customers to investigate and test new products. Neither Lyft nor Anthropic share such products, but a human spokesman said Lyft’s feedback will help ensure that the company’s model and features are “helpful to end users.”
Humanity has recently raised $13.755 billion per pitchbook data, including $1 billion from Google. The company is in the process of raising another $2 billion at a $60 billion valuation.
This article has been updated with more information on Lyft’s customer care resolution.
