Ride-hailing giant Lyft has partnered with AI startup Anthropic to develop an AI-powered customer service assistant, marking a significant step in the company's efforts to improve its customer experience. The collaboration, which is the first phase of a broader partnership between the two companies, aims to leverage Anthropic's large language models to provide more human-like responses to customer inquiries.

The new AI assistant, which has been quietly incorporated into Lyft's customer care system since late 2024, uses Anthropic's Claude family of large language models to provide answers to common support issues and redirect customers to human specialists for more complex tasks. This move comes four months after Uber, Lyft's main rival, announced a similar partnership with OpenAI to launch an AI-powered assistant for driver questions about electric vehicles.

This is not Lyft's first foray into AI-powered customer service. The company introduced its first chatbot in 2018 to help triage customer complaints. However, as many customers can attest, traditional chatbots often fall short in providing effective solutions, leading to frustration and mistrust. Anthropic's Claude, known for its human-like responses, may offer a significant improvement in this regard.

Despite the promises of generative AI, many customers remain skeptical about interacting with chatbots. A recent Gartner survey found that 64% of customers prefer not to have AI involved in customer service, while another study revealed that customers' emotional trust is lowered when they realize they are interacting with an AI chatbot. It remains to be seen whether Lyft's Claude-powered assistant can overcome these hurdles and provide a more satisfying customer experience.

According to Lyft, the new AI assistant has already shown promising results, reducing the average customer service resolution time by 87% and resolving thousands of customer requests daily. However, the company has not provided clear definitions of what constitutes a "resolved" customer service request, leaving some questions about the efficacy of the system.

The partnership between Lyft and Anthropic goes beyond chatbots, with Anthropic providing training and education to Lyft's engineers to incorporate its tools into their workflows. This could have significant implications for Lyft's ability to compete with Uber, as Anthropic's tools could help improve the ride-hailing platform's overall service.

Lyft's executive vice president of platforms, Jason Vogrinec, emphasized the potential of generative AI technologies to revolutionize software engineering, stating that "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."

Anthropic, which has raised $13.75 billion to date, including a recent $1 billion investment from Google, is also running an "exclusive early access program" that allows select customers to research and test new products. While neither Lyft nor Anthropic has disclosed what these products might be, an Anthropic spokesperson indicated that Lyft's feedback would help ensure that the company's models and capabilities are "helpful for end users."

As the ride-hailing industry continues to evolve, partnerships like the one between Lyft and Anthropic may play a crucial role in shaping the future of customer service and software development. With the potential to improve customer experiences and drive innovation, this collaboration is certainly one to watch in the coming months.