Lyft and Anthropic Partner on AI Products for Ridesharing

Ridesharing company Lyft and artificial intelligence firm Anthropic said Thursday (Feb. 6) that they are working together to create AI products to serve Lyft’s riders and drivers.

The first phase of the collaboration is already underway, with Lyft’s customer care AI assistant being powered by Anthropic’s AI model, Claude, via Amazon Bedrock, Anthropic said in a Thursday press release.

This AI assistant handles thousands of customers inquiries each day, transitions complex cases to human specialists when needed, and has reduced customer service resolution time by 87%, according to the release.

“Lyft is using Claude to both reimagine the future of ridesharing, and at the same time deliver tangible benefits to their community today,” Anthropic Vice President of Product Management Michael Gerstenhaber said in the release.

The collaboration of the two companies will also include other AI applications designed to enhance the rideshare experience for both riders and drivers, Lyft’s participation in early testing for new products and capabilities, and Anthropic’s training of Lyft’s engineering teams to accelerate their ability to build AI-powered features, according to the release.

“Software engineering has undergone a seismic shift with the introduction of GenAI technologies,” Lyft Executive Vice President, Platforms Jason Vogrinec said in Lyft’s press release about the partnership. “Gone are the days when humans were predominantly writing code. With the promise of LLMs, especially leading models for coding like Claude, and agentic AI, we’re working to revolutionize our engineering organization to more effectively build game changing products for our customers.”

Generating code and assisting employees and customers with accessing information are the two highest ranked use cases for generative AI, according to the PYMNTS Intelligence report, “AI in the Chat: Generative AI’s Growing Role in Customer Service.”

The report found that the percentage of chief marketing officers who found the technology “very or extremely effective” for generating code increased from 80% in April to 100% in July, while the percentage who said the same about accessing information increased from 72% in April to 97% in July.

It was reported in January that Google invested more than $1 billion into Anthropic, upping its stake in the AI company after already giving it $2 billion.

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