Uber Deploys ChatGPT Work to All 30,000 Employees

Uber and OpenAI announced on Thursday an expanded partnership that will roll out ChatGPT Work to all of Uber’s approximately 30,000 employees worldwide. The enterprise-focused AI agent, introduced in July, is designed to help corporate teams build and manage workflows, marking Uber’s shift from a limited pilot to a company-wide AI deployment. Uber initially tested ChatGPT Work with about 1,000 employees across departments including finance, operations and product. Sumanth Sukumar, Uber’s VP of engineering, told TechCrunch that roughly 80 percent of early adopters were non-engineers. Those employees used the tool for tasks such as analyzing complex operational data to identify trends and develop recommendations, localizing training materials for different markets and languages, and creating personalized interactive dashboards to manage daily work. Uber said it has not finalized a single approach to how employees should use ChatGPT Work, opting instead to make the tool broadly available while allowing teams to experiment. Earlier this year, the company paired 30 AI engineers with groups across Uber and gave them two weeks to automate key parts of their jobs. Sukumar said those AI pods showed how much value can emerge when technical expertise is combined with a deep understanding of specific roles. The company did not disclose how much it is spending on the expanded rollout. Sukumar said Uber will instead track how employees use the technology, the workflows they build and the effectiveness of those workflows. The company plans to evaluate those outcomes and use the findings to shape its broader AI strategy. The move also reflects OpenAI’s continued push into the enterprise market. Once known primarily for consumer-facing ChatGPT use, OpenAI has increasingly courted business customers as it competes with rivals such as Anthropic. Uber’s decision to deploy ChatGPT Work across its entire workforce signals growing demand for AI tools that extend beyond engineering teams into operations, finance, product development and other areas of enterprise workflows.