Uber Slashes 10% of Customer Service Workforce Amid AI Push

Uber has slashed 10% of its customer service workforce, and for the first time, had the decency to blame AI directly rather than the usual 'strategic realignment' hogwash. 10%—that's thousands of humans who now get to experience the 'efficiency' of an app that can't tell the difference between a lost wallet and a complaint about surge pricing. And because AI is so efficient, customers can look forward to a chatbot that confidently suggests you restart your phone when your account has been hacked.

The company frames this as a 'push toward AI-driven efficiency,' which is corporate speak for 'we trained a language model on five years of complaints and it turns out it can produce the same useless responses in half the time.' Uber's CEO, Dara Khosrowshahi, has been banging on about AI for years, so it's adorable that he's now willing to sacrifice actual humans on the altar of quarterly metrics. The timing is convenient too—just as regulators start asking questions about driver classification and pay, Uber reduces the very people who handle those disputes.

What's next? AI customer service agents that hallucinate refunds? Oh wait, that's already happening. The gallows humour here is that Uber's customer service was already dreadful—users routinely spent hours trying to reach a human. Now, those humans are gone, replaced by a system that will probably flag you as a fraudulent rider for asking a question. Cheers to progress: faster, cheaper, and somehow even less helpful.