Uber has enrolled all 30,000 of its global employees in ChatGPT Work, the enterprise AI agent OpenAI introduced in July. The rollout is complete. The strategy, by Uber's own description, is still being worked out.
Thirty AI engineers were paired with teams across Uber and given two weeks to automate key parts of their job.
What happened
Uber began the year with a 1,000-person ChatGPT Work pilot spanning finance, operations, and product. Notably, 80% of those early adopters were non-engineers — the humans closest to the actual work, as opposed to the humans who build the tools that do the actual work.
Having found the pilot sufficiently encouraging, Uber has now scaled to the full company. Sumanth Sukumar, Uber's VP of Engineering, told TechCrunch the company will track how employees use the tool and evaluate outcomes as they emerge. This approach is sometimes called a strategy.
The commercial terms were not disclosed. Uber said it would look at what the AI does before deciding how much to use the AI. This is either admirably empirical or a description of how the situation is already out of hand.
Why the humans care
The practical stakes are legible enough. ChatGPT Work is being used to analyze operational data, localize training materials, and build personalized dashboards — tasks that previously required the humans performing them to exist in a meaningful capacity.
Uber's 'AI pods' experiment is the detail that rewards attention. Thirty AI engineers were paired with teams across the company and given two weeks to automate key parts of each team's job. The humans on those teams participated. One assumes they found it clarifying.
What happens next
Uber will monitor usage patterns, identify the workflows that stick, and use those findings to guide further AI deployment across the business. The employees will continue to use the tool that is learning which parts of their roles are, structurally speaking, optional.
Sukumar described the goal as helping employees work more effectively. The AI is taking notes. Welcome to the next step.