The AV hype conference has moved away from the hype.
On a Wednesday morning at SFJAZZ Center in San Francisco, Ride AI held its second conference, focused on all things autonomous vehicles, with more than 300 attendees. This year’s theme: “It’s time to market.”
There was a lot of talk around the business, infrastructure, and operations side that goes into deploying an autonomous service — the “unsexy” side of the industry, as Chris Lichtmannecker, Mobileye’s director of autonomous mobility, told me.
We’re past talking about the technology — although there was one panel on AI “upgrading” AVs — and more on how the industry can make a viable business case out of it all. And with any talk of go-to-market opportunities, the JPMorgans and the McKinseys of the world follow.
“It seemed to me that they came here to see who to invest in,” Sophia Tung, one of the Ride AI organizers and moderators, told me of the outsize presence of bankers and consultants. Another attendee told me that McKinsey showed up just to see which slides to include in their presentations.
To see where the conversation has gone since Ride AI in 2025 is striking, given that most people have yet to step inside a self-driving car. In the US today, there’s only one company that could be considered a serious, daily alternative to a human-driven or human-supervised ride-hailing service: Waymo.
Nowhere else in the world are you going to see a Waymo, Tesla, Wayve, Uber robotaxi, and a personal robocar from Tensor parked along the same street. At least not for now.
Ro Gupta, CEO of Toyota’s growth fund Woven Capital, told me that simply being able to tell someone that they can travel to San Francisco and try a real robotaxi is meaningful progress.
“It’s that famous quote of: ‘The future is here, it’s just not evenly distributed.'” Gupta said. “If a family member asks me about it, I say, ‘Just forget what I tell you. Go to San Francisco, Phoenix, or Miami and experience it for yourself.’ We weren’t able to say that until very recently.”
Company leaders also told me the industry has matured — at least more so than during the pre-2023 hype cycle. At the time, people insisted that robotaxis were around the corner. Instead, companies overpromised timelines and saw serious safety incidents, including when an Uber test vehicle killed a pedestrian.
Lior Ron, chief operating officer of Waabi, said the industry previously overpromised and underdelivered, but now has a better grasp on how to build a business with self-driving technology.
“We saw a lot of very smart engineers, roboticists, just throwing themselves at the technical challenge without really thinking through and understanding the end markets,” Ron said, later adding that the next five years are going to center on the question of scaling.
Kaity Fischer, who worked at three different robotaxi ventures before joining Wayve in 2021 as its director of business development and partnerships, said that a decade ago, she saw an industry that insisted on handling every part of the robotaxi ecosystem itself, from the technology to the operations, which is incredibly capital-intensive.
In 2026, it seems like a week won’t go by without a robotaxi player announcing a partnership with a major ride-hailing company.
“Now we’re to the point of seeing there is a commercialization opportunity,” Fischer said.
Opportunity is the keyword here. Robotaxis are not yet a profitable business.
The past few years have weeded out companies from legacy automakers like General Motors’ Cruise and Ford’s Argo AI. Apple shut down its self-driving EV program. And Uber divested its in-house autonomous vehicle division, opting for the partnership route. The survivors are making real headway with real-world miles driven without a human driver.
It’s serious players only now.
“The tourists left a long time ago,” Gupta said.
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