{"slug": "uber-employees-say-ai-is-doing-everything-from-writing-support-chat-responses-to", "title": "Uber employees say AI is doing everything from writing support chat responses to answering questions in Slack", "summary": "Uber laid off about 3,300 employees earlier this month, including all six recently laid-off workers who told Business Insider that AI tools such as Genie, Glean, Gemini, and ChatGPT had taken over tasks from answering Slack questions to writing customer-service responses. One laid-off employee said an AI tool cut his job time to one-fifth of what it used to be, while former GenAI team evaluation specialist Kori X said managers warned staff, \"Don't be using ChatGPT to do your work for you.\" CEO Dara Khosrowshahi cited cutting \"management layers\" in the layoff memo and did not name AI as a motivation, though Uber has deployed forward-deployed engineers in \"agentic pods\" and began cutting or reducing credits to services like Claude in the first half of this year.", "body_md": "At Uber, AI does everything from answering employees' questions in Slack to writing the response you get when you message customer service during a ride.\n\nSix recently laid-off employees who spoke with Business Insider pointed to several ways that AI became more prevalent in their jobs over the past few months. Some said that they were prompting AI to do substantial portions of their work.\n\nUber declined to comment for this story. Earlier this month, the company laid off about 3,300 people, including all of the employees Business Insider spoke with for this article.\n\nCEO [Dara Khosrowshahi](https://www.businessinsider.com/uber-layoffs-corporate-workforce-restructuring-memo-2026-9) said at the time that the layoffs aimed to cut \"management layers\" and reduce the number of teams where managers had as few as one or two direct reports. Khosrowshahi didn't cite AI as a motivation in a memo announcing the layoffs.\n\nAt the same time, the employees who spoke with Business Insider said that the company has pushed ahead with implementing AI in a wide variety of uses.\n\nOne employee said that in the weeks before being laid off he was using an AI tool that reduced the time it took to do his job to one-fifth of what it used to be.\n\n\"AI definitely feels like the dynamite under the bridge for a lot of us,\" the employee said.\n\n## 'Don't be using ChatGPT to do your work for you'\n\nA laid-off employee in Uber's advertising business said that managers were increasingly urging them to use Gemini and ChatGPT to prepare for client meetings.\n\n\"We were asked to use AI all the time,\" the employee said. \"It was part of our day-to-day work.\"\n\nIn many internal Slack channels, Uber uses an AI chatbot called Genie, which provides \"prompt responses with proper citations from Uber's internal documentation,\" the company wrote in a [blog post](https://www.uber.com/us/en/blog/enhanced-agentic-rag/) last year.\n\nThe chatbot provides answers to questions that employees post, the employee said, providing a lot of guidance that previously came from managers.\n\n\"If anybody else had an answer for you, then they replied,\" the employee said. \"But it was usually AI replying to us about any questions we had.\"\n\nAnother employee who worked in customer service said that they used Glean, a similar tool trained on internal company documents, to respond to help requests from Uber drivers and passengers.\n\nThe tools were meant to help customer service agents find information, the employee said. They often copied and pasted answers from the tools directly into the chat.\n\n\"It wasn't what we were supposed to use, but it was a tool available to use when our knowledge base wasn't working,\" the employee said.\n\nOther Uber employees said that their managers cautioned against that sort of AI use.\n\n\"We're also getting guidance like 'Don't be using ChatGPT to do your work for you,'\" Kori X, a former evaluation specialist on [Uber's GenAI team](https://www.businessinsider.com/uber-employee-laid-off-second-time-worst-fear-2026-9) said.\n\n\"I think they're struggling with why they are paying these people if they're just using ChatGPT,\" X said.\n\n## Uber saw 'real tailwinds' from AI productivity\n\nAnother laid-off employee said that they didn't feel pressured to use AI at work.\n\nThe company took a measured approach to implementing AI compared to other tech companies, this employee said, offering office hours, explaining to employees what AI could and couldn't do, and curbing the use of AI-generated pictures in external communication.\n\nUber previously said it has used forward-deployed engineers in \"[agentic pods](https://www.businessinsider.com/uber-cto-bets-on-agentic-pods-make-ai-more-efficient-2026-7)\" to identify uses of AI across the company, from finance to HR.\n\nUber started cutting off or reducing credits to services like Claude in the first half of this year, the employee said.\n\n[Uber executives](https://www.businessinsider.com/uber-coo-andrew-macdonald-ai-token-spending-harder-justify-2026-5) said around the same time that they had already spent their Claude budget for the year and that the company wasn't seeing productivity gains commensurate with what it was spending on AI tools.\n\nIn a presentation at an industry conference last week, Khosrowshahi cited some of the same justifications for the layoffs as in his memo the previous week.\n\nUber wanted to \"have more doers versus managers,\" he said, and reduced the number of \"micro-teams\" where managers had as few as one or two direct reports.\n\nAt the same time, Uber saw an opportunity with the restructuring to take advantage of \"real tailwinds as it relates to productivity, whether it is AI or general productivity technology as well,\" he said.\n\n*Do you have a story idea about Uber? Contact this reporter at* __abitter@businessinsider.com__ *or via encrypted messaging app Signal at 808-854-4501. Use a personal email address, a nonwork WiFi network, and a nonwork device; here's our guide to sharing information securely.*", "url": "https://wpnews.pro/news/uber-employees-say-ai-is-doing-everything-from-writing-support-chat-responses-to", "canonical_source": "https://www.businessinsider.com/uber-ai-usage-layoffs-questioned-by-former-staff-2026-9", "published_at": "2026-09-17 19:00:59+00:00", "updated_at": "2026-09-17 19:25:06.268265+00:00", "lang": "en", "topics": ["artificial-intelligence", "ai-products", "ai-agents", "ai-tools"], "entities": ["Uber", "Dara Khosrowshahi", "Genie", "Glean", "ChatGPT", "Gemini", "Claude", "Kori X"], "alternates": {"html": "https://wpnews.pro/news/uber-employees-say-ai-is-doing-everything-from-writing-support-chat-responses-to", "markdown": "https://wpnews.pro/news/uber-employees-say-ai-is-doing-everything-from-writing-support-chat-responses-to.md", "text": "https://wpnews.pro/news/uber-employees-say-ai-is-doing-everything-from-writing-support-chat-responses-to.txt", "jsonld": "https://wpnews.pro/news/uber-employees-say-ai-is-doing-everything-from-writing-support-chat-responses-to.jsonld"}}