Remember the executive who sparked the tokenmaxxing panic earlier this year after saying Uber had already blown through its 2026 budget for Anthropic’s Claude Code? He’s back with a more interesting lesson about AI.
Uber CTO Praveen Neppalli Naga says the company has started sending its best AI engineers into departments like finance, legal, marketing, customer support, HR, and procurement to study how people actually work before building AI tools with them.
He called these two-week teams “Agentic Pods.” Engineers spend the first few days shadowing employees, learning every step of a workflow, then quickly build and test software to improve it.
