Ride-hailing platform Lyft ties up with Anthropic for AI-powered customer care

By Akash Sriram

(Reuters) - Lyft said on Thursday it has tied up with Amazon and Alphabet-backed startup Anthropic to roll out artificial intelligence tools for the ride-hailing platform's customer care operations.

The company said it has been using Anthropic's Claude AI model, through Amazon's Bedrock generative AI platform, which has helped reduce the average customer service resolution time by 87% and is resolving thousands of customer requests each day.

While the use of advanced AI in customer service operations has fueled worries over job loss in the industry, Lyft said there would continue to be a need for human customer support agents.

The company said it was working to first try to resolve customer issues using the AI assistant and then guiding them to a human if there is a need for further assistance.

"We see AI as an opportunity to improve the quality and effectiveness of our operations, not to reduce headcount," said Jason Vogrinec, executive vice president, platforms at Lyft.

According to some industry experts, an AI model's ability to make up information or produce incorrect outputs can hinder its ability to fully replace a human customer service agent.

Issues such as safety, deactivations, fraud and other complexities will continue to be analyzed and resolved by human agents, Lyft said.

The partnership between Lyft and Anthropic will enable future collaborations on tools that will help both riders and drivers, it said. The AI startup will train Lyft's engineers on the technology.

Lyft is set to report its quarterly results after markets close on Tuesday.

(Reporting by Akash Sriram in Bengaluru; Editing by Shilpi Majumdar)