Uber Cuts About 3,300 Jobs; Laid-Off Employees Say AI Has Pervaded Daily Work

Uber has cut about 3,300 jobs globally earlier this month, according to a Business Insider report. CEO Dara Khosrowshahi said the layoffs were mainly aimed at flattening management layers and reducing the number of teams where managers oversee only one or two direct reports. He did not cite AI as a reason in the memo announcing the job cuts.

Six recently laid-off employees said the use of AI at work had expanded significantly over the past few months, with some using prompts to complete a considerable portion of their tasks. One employee said an AI tool he used weeks before being laid off cut his working time to one-fifth of the original. A former employee from Uber's advertising business said managers increasingly asked staff to use Gemini and ChatGPT to prepare for client meetings.

Last year, Uber said it had deployed an AI chatbot named Genie across many internal Slack channels, which could quickly answer employee questions based on internal documents. One employee said Genie had taken on much of the guidance previously provided by managers. Another employee in customer service used Glean to handle requests from drivers and riders. The tool was also trained on internal company documents, and customer service staff often copied generated answers directly into conversations, though that was not the prescribed use.

Meanwhile, some employees faced the opposite requirement: managers reminded them not to let AI complete their work directly. A former evaluation expert on Uber's generative AI team said there were internal instructions like "Don't use ChatGPT to do your job." Another laid-off employee felt Uber was relatively restrained in adopting AI compared with other tech companies, holding dedicated Q&A sessions to explain what AI can and cannot do, and limiting the use of AI-generated images in external communications.

The report also said Uber began stopping or reducing access to services like Claude in the first half of this year, and executives said the company spent its entire annual Claude budget without seeing productivity gains matching the investment.