A top Uber exec said AI is not giving the company bang for its buck. <\/p>\n
In a Rapid Response interview<\/a> released on Saturday, Uber’s operations chief, Andrew Macdonald, said it was becoming harder to justify AI costs within the company.<\/p>\n 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. <\/p>\n The comment led to what he described as a “head-exploding moment,” sparking discussions about AI token consumption<\/a> within the company and the trade-offs it creates, such as on head count.<\/p>\n 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.<\/p>\n “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.'”<\/p>\n 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<\/a> to counter its investments in AI.<\/p>\n 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.<\/p>\n While Big Tech is going hard on tokenmaxxing \u2014using AI as much as possible \u2014 and\u00a0evaluating\u00a0<\/a>employees<\/a> by their AI usage, some companies are starting to go the other way. <\/p>\n