Laid-Off Uber Staff Report Heavy Reliance on Internal and Commercial AI Tools
Former Uber employees reported that generative AI tools—including ChatGPT, Gemini, Glean, and Uber's internal Slack copilot Genie—have become deeply embedded into daily tasks across departments like advertising and customer support. This widespread adoption comes alongside Uber's recent layoff of approximately 3,300 workers, which CEO Dara Khosrowshahi attributed to flattening management structures rather than AI. The situation highlights the growing tension between AI-driven productivity gains and tech industry layoffs. As enterprises encourage employees to leverage generative AI for daily tasks, executives face difficult questions regarding headcount necessity and the true return on investment of costly AI subscriptions. While some employees noted AI reduced task completion times to one-fifth, management experienced mixed results regarding ROI. Notably, Uber reportedly exhausted its annual budget for Anthropic's Claude early in the year without seeing proportional productivity gains, prompting cutbacks on user access limits.
## BACKGROUND
To streamline operations, Uber developed Genie, an agentic Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) copilot deployed in Slack support channels to answer employee technical and workflow questions using internal documentation. Enterprise tech companies frequently combine custom internal tools like Genie with specialized search software like Glean and third-party LLMs to automate knowledge lookup and routine customer communications.