The Uber ChatGPT Work rollout puts OpenAI’s enterprise AI agent in the hands of the company’s whole global workforce, about 30,000 people. Uber and OpenAI announced the expanded partnership on Thursday, October 22, according to TechCrunch. We haven’t seen either company’s own announcement, so the details below come from TechCrunch’s report.
What Uber announced
Uber first tried ChatGPT Work with 1,000 employees earlier this year and has now scaled it company-wide. OpenAI introduced the product in July as an enterprise-focused AI agent that corporate teams can deploy for different workflows. Uber says OpenAI worked closely with it on integrating the chatbot.
What the Uber ChatGPT Work pilot found
The pilot drew employees from finance, operations, and product, among other departments. About 80% of early adopters weren’t engineers, according to Sumanth Sukumar, Uber’s vice president of engineering. TechCrunch lists three uses: analyzing complex operations data to spot trends and draft recommendations, localizing training materials for different markets and languages, and building personalized, interactive dashboards to manage daily work.
Sukumar also described what the report calls “AI pods.” Earlier this year, Uber paired 30 AI engineers with teams across the company and gave them two weeks to automate key parts of those teams’ jobs. He said the exercise showed how much opportunity there is when technical expertise meets deep knowledge of a specific job.
How Uber plans to measure the rollout
There’s no fixed playbook yet. Uber hasn’t decided exactly how employees should use the tool, and Sukumar said the company wants to make powerful AI tools broadly available while letting teams experiment. It will track how people use the tool, which workflows they build, and whether it helps them work more effectively. Uber then plans to use those results to guide AI deployment across the business.
Uber’s other AI moves this year
The rollout doesn’t stand alone. In July, Engadget reported that Uber cut 10% of its customer service staff, in its Community Operations unit. Citing Bloomberg, Engadget quoted an Uber spokesperson saying the cuts were made “to simplify operations, strengthen in-person collaboration and continue to embrace AI.” Engadget also noted that Uber had earlier said it was slowing hiring because of AI. TechCrunch’s report on the Uber ChatGPT Work rollout mentions no job cuts, and we haven’t seen Uber tie this tool to staffing decisions. Still, the two stories together explain why employees and investors will watch how the company uses AI.
What Uber hasn’t said
Uber didn’t disclose what the rollout costs. The report also doesn’t say how the tool handles company data or what safeguards apply, which are the questions to ask of any company-wide agent. For a primer on what these tools can and can’t do, see our guide to AI agents, and how Microsoft approaches the control problem with its agent risk scores.
The competitive picture
TechCrunch says OpenAI is growing its enterprise business quickly while competing with Anthropic, and that ChatGPT, once known mainly as a consumer brand, has built a loyal following among business customers while other AI companies have struggled to keep up. A deal that covers an entire workforce is the kind of reference customer that matters in that race. For more on the pressure around OpenAI, see our report on the lawsuit from eight states.
Editor’s take
The detail that stands out is that most pilot users weren’t engineers. That’s the case companies want to make for agents: they’re for everyone, not just developers. But the report gives no cost figure and no result beyond examples, so the business case is unproven. Our read is that Uber ChatGPT Work is a bet on adoption first and measurement second. We’d watch for any numbers Uber shares on time saved, and for whether other large employers follow with company-wide rollouts of their own.
