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

Uber laid off about 3,300 people earlier this month, including every employee Business Insider spoke with for its report. CEO Dara Khosrowshahi said the layoffs aimed to cut "management layers." Business Insider published the article under the headline "Uber employees say AI is doing everything from writing support chat responses to answering questions in Slack." The report describes internal AI use at Uber based on accounts from staff who were among those laid off.

According to the article, laid-off staff described heavy internal AI use at the company, saying the technology was doing everything from writing support chat responses to answering questions in Slack. Business Insider reports that Uber executives said the company had already spent its Claude budget for the year, and that it was not seeing productivity gains commensurate with its AI spending.

Business Insider attributes the account of internal AI use to employees who were among those laid off, and the statements about the Claude budget and productivity to Uber executives. Khosrowshahi's stated rationale for the cuts was to reduce management layers, while the laid-off staff's accounts focus on how much AI was doing inside the company. The article places the company's internal AI use and its spending on Claude alongside the layoffs it describes. The article's headline states that the layoffs were questioned by former staff. The article does not specify how many of the approximately 3,300 roles were affected by AI tools, nor does it give a figure for Uber's Claude spending.