Uber Rolls Out ChatGPT Work to More Than 30,000 Employees Weeks After Announcing 3,300 Job Cuts
Uber is giving ChatGPT Work to more than 30,000 employees around the world. This comes seven weeks after the company announced plans to cut about 3,300 jobs as part of a major change to how it runs its business.
Uber first tested the tool with 1,000 employees. Now, workers across the company will be able to use OpenAI's AI assistant to help with tasks such as finding information, studying data, making presentations and managing work.
Uber is expanding its use of AI around the same time that it is making changes to its workforce. However, neither Uber nor OpenAI has said these two decisions are connected. There is also no evidence that the planned job cuts happened because Uber decided to use ChatGPT Work.
Uber's Plan to Cut 3,300 Jobs
On 2 September, Uber announced that it planned to cut about 10% of its workforce. Reports said this would affect around 3,300 jobs.
Uber's chief executive, Dara Khosrowshahi, said the changes were meant to make the company easier to manage, reduce the number of management levels and help teams work faster. Uber also said it wanted to put more employees and money into the business opportunities that mattered most.
Uber described the job cuts as changes to how the company is organised. It said the decision was not a judgment about the work employees had done.
Uber did not say AI was the reason for the planned job cuts. But its decision to expand ChatGPT Work raises a bigger question for other companies too: as large businesses start using AI in their daily work, how will it change what employees do and how companies organise their teams?
ChatGPT Work Becomes Available Across Uber
On 22 October, OpenAI announced that more than 30,000 Uber employees around the world would be able to use ChatGPT Work.
Uber had already tested the technology with 1,000 employees. According to OpenAI, this is the first time Uber is introducing an AI platform that can carry out tasks on its own across the whole company. The platform is designed for work that mainly involves using information, solving problems and making decisions.
ChatGPT Work is designed to do tasks that involve several steps, instead of only answering one question at a time. It can help employees find and study information, prepare notes for meetings, make presentations and examine data. It can also complete work that involves using several different apps.
OpenAI said ChatGPT Work can connect to tools such as Google Drive, Gmail, Google Calendar and Slack. Uber is also helping employees learn how to use it by providing a collection of AI learning materials, approved connections to other tools and special training sessions.
Teams working in operations, finance, marketing and product development will be able to use the technology. Software engineering teams will continue using Codex, OpenAI's tool designed to help with writing computer code.
The first test showed that interest in AI at work was not limited to employees with technical jobs. TechCrunch reported that about 80% of the employees who started using the tool early were not engineers. The report cited Sumanth Sukumar, Uber's vice-president of engineering.
Uber's AI Pods
During the first test, Uber also tried a new way of helping employees find parts of their jobs that AI could do automatically.
According to Sukumar, Uber paired 30 AI engineers with different teams for two weeks. Their job was to help those teams use AI to automatically complete important parts of their work. Sukumar called these groups 'AI pods'.
Sukumar told TechCrunch that employees used the AI tools to study complicated information about Uber's daily operations, spot patterns and suggest what the company could do next. Employees also used AI to adapt training materials for different countries and languages. Some built personalised, interactive screens that showed useful information and helped them manage their daily tasks.
These examples show how Uber is testing AI to help with real tasks across the company, including work that employees used to do by hand.
However, these examples do not prove that Uber is using ChatGPT Work to get rid of jobs. They also do not show that the technology had anything to do with the job cuts announced in September. Making individual tasks automatic is different from replacing an employee's entire job. Uber has not shown that the two announcements are connected.
Uber has said it wants employees to have the freedom to try different ways of using AI. As more workers begin using ChatGPT Work, the company plans to measure how often employees use it, what tasks they use it for and how well it helps them work.
How Much Will Uber's AI Rollout Cost?
Giving AI tools to so many employees also raises questions about the costs and effects on the business of introducing the technology across such a large workforce.
TechCrunch reported that Uber did not say how much it would spend on the rollout. OpenAI's public announcement also did not give specific numbers showing whether the wider use of ChatGPT Work had helped employees get more done, saved time or brought financial benefits to the company.
OpenAI said employees would receive training, approved connections to other tools and learning materials from inside Uber to help them use ChatGPT Work properly. Uber and OpenAI said they plan to share more information as the rollout continues. This will include how many employees use the technology, what they use it for and what results can be measured.
For now, giving ChatGPT Work to so many employees shows that Uber is serious about making AI part of its everyday business. But the company still needs to measure how useful the technology really is.
OpenAI Wants More Companies to Use Its Tools
For OpenAI, Uber's decision is a major step in getting its technology used by a large international company.
Instead of giving ChatGPT Work only to a small group of experts, Uber is making it available to employees doing many different kinds of jobs. This gives Uber a chance to find out how well AI agents, which can carry out tasks for people, can help different teams when used by thousands of employees.
OpenAI's president and co-founder, Greg Brockman, described Uber's rollout as a step towards giving more employees access to powerful AI tools that can help them complete difficult work.
Uber's chief technology officer, Praveen Neppalli Naga, said the company wanted to give employees tools that would help them come up with new ideas, solve problems and help decide what Uber does in the future. He added: 'I can't wait to see what our teams build with it.'
Whether this rollout becomes important in the long run will depend on several things: whether employees keep using ChatGPT Work regularly, whether it actually helps them do their jobs better and whether Uber can show clear, measurable improvements.
Uber is expanding access to AI only weeks after announcing plans to cut thousands of jobs, so people are likely to pay close attention to the results. However, the evidence available so far does not show that ChatGPT Work is connected to those job cuts.