Uber for Business has added an audit feature that
automatically flags rides that appear to be nonbusiness-related, product and
engineering lead Greg Greiner announced at BTN's
Innovate conference.
The feature aggregates data by employee, company and geography
and looks for patterns as to what constitutes a business ride versus a leisure
ride. It factors in such data as time of the ride, destination and length of
trip. If a traveler pays for a seemingly nonbusiness ride with his or her business
profile, Uber requires the traveler either to enter more information to confirm
it's a business ride or to switch the ride to his or her personal Uber profile.
The feature tailors to companies' and individuals' travel
patterns and is 90 percent accurate, according to Greiner. That will improve
over time, he said. "As you manually flag trips and employees act on
flags, we learn more about your company, which makes our model more
accurate," Greiner said.
Uber for Business announced a manual
auditing tool for travel managers this summer.