A top Uber exec said AI is not giving the company bang for its buck.
In a Rapid Response interview released on Saturday, Uber's operations chief, Andrew Macdonald, said it was becoming harder to justify AI costs within the company.
He said that Uber CTO Praveen Neppalli Naga went viral after telling The Information in an April interview that Uber had already blown through its Claude Code budget for 2026.
The comment led to what he described as a "head-exploding moment," sparking discussions about AI token consumption within the company and the trade-offs it creates, such as on head count.
He said that, based on talks with Uber's senior engineering leaders, he realized higher token usage did not translate into a proportional increase in useful consumer features.
"That link is not there yet, right?" he said. "I think maybe implicitly there is more that is getting shipped, but it's very hard to draw a line between one of those stats and, 'Okay, now we're actually producing 25% more useful consumer features.'"
He said that the trade-off costs from AI are harder to justify because he can't draw a direct link. Earlier this month, CEO Dara Khosrowshahi said in an earnings call that Uber was slowing hiring to counter its investments in AI.
Macdonald added that AI can seem free if you're "just a user sitting there coming up with interesting use cases" without paying for it. But ultimately, the company foots the bill.
While Big Tech is going hard on tokenmaxxing —using AI as much as possible — and evaluating employees by their AI usage, some companies are starting to go the other way. Duolingo, for instance, walked back its decision to include AI usage in performance reviews after employees asked whether they had to use AI for the sake of using it.
"It felt like, rather than being held accountable for the actual outcome, we were trying to just push something that in some cases did not fit," Duolingo CEO Luis von Ahn said in a podcast interview in April.