Uber employees say AI is doing everything from writing support chat responses to answering questions in Slack - Business Insider

Uber has laid off about 3,300 people, including every single employee Business Insider managed to speak to — which is one way to keep the quotes tidy. CEO Dara Khosrowshahi says the cuts were about trimming "management layers," a phrase that has been asked to carry more weight this decade than any model still in beta. Meanwhile, laid-off staff describe an outfit where AI writes support chat responses and answers questions in Slack. So the management layer was also doing the work the AI now does, and the company decided the layer was the problem.

Here's the bit worth savouring: Uber executives concede the company had already spent its Claude budget for the year and wasn't seeing productivity gains "commensurate" with its AI spending. The bill arrived. The gains did not. And 3,300 people were shown the door anyway, on the theory that if the machine can't match a human, the next best thing is to remove the human and call it transformation. "Commensurate" is the tell — nobody reaches for that word unless a spreadsheet has just made them wince.

The former staff are now questioning the layoffs, which is noble — most of us would be questioning the executive bonus schedule. But the sequence is drearily familiar: buy the tokens, blow the budget, deploy the assistant, watch it answer Slack questions with the serene confidence of a man who has never been wrong, then redraw the org chart until the arithmetic stops screaming. Uber's Claude spend is a sunk cost. The 3,300 are a sunk cost too, only they had mortgages and performance reviews. When the productivity gains finally land — any quarter now, we're assured — there'll be a lovely symmetry to it: the management layers get trimmed a second time, by the same tool that failed to justify the first round.