Artificial intelligence is rapidly spreading across work at ride-hailing platform Uber, from internal Q&A to customer support and sales preparation.

Business Insider reported on Sept. 17 that recently laid-off Uber employees said the company has expanded the adoption of AI across multiple tasks in recent months, and some employees handed a substantial share of their work to AI tools.

A former Uber employee said that after using AI tools for several weeks, the time required to complete tasks fell to about one-fifth of the previous level. The employee said the spread of AI felt to many workers like dynamite placed under a bridge.

An employee who worked in advertising also said managers increasingly encouraged the use of Google Gemini and OpenAI's ChatGPT when preparing for client meetings. "We were always asked to use AI," the employee said. "Using AI was part of our daily routine," the employee added.

AI use has also expanded on the internal collaboration tool Slack. Uber operates an AI chatbot called Genie across multiple internal Slack channels. Genie answers employees' questions based on Uber internal documents. One employee said AI now handles many questions that were previously asked of managers or colleagues.

Similar changes appeared in the customer service organisation. A former employee in that unit said they used an AI tool called Glean, which searches internal documents, to respond to inquiries from Uber drivers and passengers. It was originally a tool to help agents find needed information, but in practice there were many cases where staff copied AI-generated answers and pasted them directly into customer chat windows, the employee said.

Uber has not encouraged handing every task over to AI. Cory X, who worked as an evaluation specialist on Uber's generative AI team, said there were also internal guidelines warning against excessive reliance on AI. "There was guidance not to let ChatGPT do your job for you," he said, adding there was a sense that if employees were simply offloading work to ChatGPT, the company could question the need to keep staff at all.

Some employees assessed that Uber introduced AI more cautiously than other technology companies. Uber ran internal briefing sessions and office hours to explain what AI can and cannot do, and it was reported to have limited the use of AI-generated images in external communications.

There were also moves to weigh cost against benefits. One employee said Uber began cutting or ending credits it provided for some AI services, including Anthropic's Claude, starting in the first half of this year. Management was said to have explained at the time that it had already used up this year's Claude-related budget but had not confirmed productivity gains matching the cost of AI tools.

Uber has previously said it has been running "agentic pods", made up of engineers deployed on the ground, to find uses for AI across areas including finance and human resources. Dara Khosrowshahi (다라 코스로샤히), Uber's chief executive, also mentioned at an industry event last week that a goal behind the recent layoffs was to increase the number of people doing the actual work rather than managers. He said the restructuring secured an opportunity to harness the "real tailwinds" provided by AI and general productivity technologies.

Ultimately, AI at Uber is both replacing part of managers' roles and spreading rapidly into frontline areas such as customer service and sales. With the company re-examining the productivity impact relative to the cost of AI tools, the key going forward is expected to be how far it expands internal automation while controlling costs.