At Uber, AI does everything from answering employees’ questions in Slack to writing the response you get when you message customer service during a ride.
Six recently laid-off employees who spoke with Business Insider pointed to several ways that AI became more prevalent in their jobs over the past few months. Some said that they were prompting AI to do substantial portions of their work.
Uber declined to comment for this story. Earlier this month, the company laid off about 3,300 people, including all of the employees Business Insider spoke with for this article.
CEO Dara Khosrowshahi said at the time that the layoffs aimed to cut “management layers” and reduce the number of teams where managers had as few as one or two direct reports. Khosrowshahi didn’t cite AI as a motivation in a memo announcing the layoffs.
At the same time, the employees who spoke with Business Insider said that the company has pushed ahead with implementing AI in a wide variety of uses.
One employee said that in the weeks before being laid off he was using an AI tool that reduced the time it took to do his job to one-fifth of what it used to be.
“AI definitely feels like the dynamite under the bridge for a lot of us,” the employee said.
‘Don’t be using ChatGPT to do your work for you’
A laid-off employee in Uber’s advertising business said that managers were increasingly urging them to use Gemini and ChatGPT to prepare for client meetings.
“We were asked to use AI all the time,” the employee said. “It was part of our day-to-day work.”
In many internal Slack channels, Uber uses an AI chatbot called Genie, which provides “prompt responses with proper citations from Uber’s internal documentation,” the company wrote in a blog post last year.
The chatbot provides answers to questions that employees post, the employee said, providing a lot of guidance that previously came from managers.
“If anybody else had an answer for you, then they replied,” the employee said. “But it was usually AI replying to us about any questions we had.”
Another employee who worked in customer service said that they used Glean, a similar tool trained on internal company documents, to respond to help requests from Uber drivers and passengers.
The tools were meant to help customer service agents find information, the employee said. They often copied and pasted answers from the tools directly into the chat.
“It wasn’t what we were supposed to use, but it was a tool available to use when our knowledge base wasn’t working,” the employee said.
Other Uber employees said that their managers cautioned against that sort of AI use.
“We’re also getting guidance like ‘Don’t be using ChatGPT to do your work for you,'” Kori X, a former evaluation specialist on Uber’s GenAI team said.
“I think they’re struggling with why they are paying these people if they’re just using ChatGPT,” X said.
Uber saw ‘real tailwinds’ from AI productivity
Another laid-off employee said that they didn’t feel pressured to use AI at work.
The company took a measured approach to implementing AI compared to other tech companies, this employee said, offering office hours, explaining to employees what AI could and couldn’t do, and curbing the use of AI-generated pictures in external communication.
Uber previously said it has used forward-deployed engineers in “agentic pods” to identify uses of AI across the company, from finance to HR.
Uber started cutting off or reducing credits to services like Claude in the first half of this year, the employee said.
Uber executives said around the same time that they had already spent their Claude budget for the year and that the company wasn’t seeing productivity gains commensurate with what it was spending on AI tools.
In a presentation at an industry conference last week, Khosrowshahi cited some of the same justifications for the layoffs as in his memo the previous week.
Uber wanted to “have more doers versus managers,” he said, and reduced the number of “micro-teams” where managers had as few as one or two direct reports.
At the same time, Uber saw an opportunity with the restructuring to take advantage of “real tailwinds as it relates to productivity, whether it is AI or general productivity technology as well,” he said.
Do you have a story idea about Uber? Contact this reporter at abitter@businessinsider.com or via encrypted messaging app Signal at 808-854-4501. Use a personal email address, a nonwork WiFi network, and a nonwork device; here’s our guide to sharing information securely.
Read the full article here
