{"slug": "after-starting-the-tokenmaxxing-panic-uber-s-cto-is-back-with-a-very-different", "title": "After starting the tokenmaxxing panic, Uber's CTO is back with a very different AI story", "summary": "Uber CTO Praveen Neppalli Naga said the company has deployed two-week \"Agentic Pods\" of its best AI engineers into departments like finance, legal, marketing, customer support, HR, and procurement to redesign workflows around AI, cutting a financial planning process from 15 hours to 30 minutes and financial reports from two days to 10 minutes. The approach, which contrasts with Naga's earlier warning about AI token costs, embeds engineers inside Uber's own operations to find productivity gains, a role Vantortech CPO Peter Wilczynski dubbed \"Rearward Deployed Engineer.", "body_md": "Remember the executive who sparked the [tokenmaxxing panic](https://www.businessinsider.com/tokenmaxxing-debate-uber-exec-viral-ai-costs-2026-5) earlier this year after saying Uber had already blown through its 2026 budget for Anthropic's Claude Code? He's back with a [more interesting lesson](https://x.com/praveenTweets/status/2074605343439810922?s=20) about AI.\n\nUber [CTO Praveen Neppalli Naga](https://www.businessinsider.com/uber-coo-andrew-macdonald-ai-token-spending-harder-justify-2026-5) says the company has started sending its best AI engineers into departments like finance, legal, marketing, customer support, HR, and procurement to study how people actually work before building AI tools with them.\n\nHe called these two-week teams \"Agentic Pods.\" Engineers spend the first few days shadowing employees, learning every step of a workflow, then quickly build and test software to improve it.\n\nThe results are striking. One financial planning process dropped from 15 hours to 30 minutes. Financial reports fell from two days to 10 minutes. Marketing quality checks shrank from two weeks to less than an hour.\n\nNaga said the biggest gains rarely come from speeding up one task. They come from redesigning an entire workflow around AI, eliminating unnecessary approvals, replacing old software, and helping people make decisions faster. You can see [this at work here](https://www.businessinsider.com/ts-imagine-ai-roi-efficiency-2025-11), too.\n\nSeveral tech executives compared the approach to Silicon Valley's fast-growing \"forward-deployed engineer\" role. The twist? Instead of sending these AI experts to customers, Uber is deploying them inside its own business to find the next wave of productivity gains.\n\nPeter Wilczynski, chief product officer at Vantortech, jokingly dubbed the role the \"[Rearward Deployed Engineer](https://x.com/petewilz/status/2074862906244555053?s=20),\" describing engineers embedded deep inside corporate operations to redesign entire workflows around AI rather than simply speeding up individual tasks.\n\n*Sign up for BI's Tech Memo newsletter *[here](https://www.businessinsider.com/subscription/newsletter/tech-memo)*. Reach out to me via email at *[abarr@businessinsider.com](mailto:abarr@businessinsider.com)*.*", "url": "https://wpnews.pro/news/after-starting-the-tokenmaxxing-panic-uber-s-cto-is-back-with-a-very-different", "canonical_source": "https://www.businessinsider.com/uber-turns-best-ai-engineers-loose-pods-business-2026-8", "published_at": "2026-08-02 13:30:01+00:00", "updated_at": "2026-08-02 13:57:14.178286+00:00", "lang": "en", "topics": ["artificial-intelligence", "ai-agents", "ai-products"], "entities": ["Uber", "Praveen Neppalli Naga", "Anthropic", "Claude Code", "Vantortech", "Peter Wilczynski"], "alternates": {"html": "https://wpnews.pro/news/after-starting-the-tokenmaxxing-panic-uber-s-cto-is-back-with-a-very-different", "markdown": "https://wpnews.pro/news/after-starting-the-tokenmaxxing-panic-uber-s-cto-is-back-with-a-very-different.md", "text": "https://wpnews.pro/news/after-starting-the-tokenmaxxing-panic-uber-s-cto-is-back-with-a-very-different.txt", "jsonld": "https://wpnews.pro/news/after-starting-the-tokenmaxxing-panic-uber-s-cto-is-back-with-a-very-different.jsonld"}}