Uber is giving every one of its roughly 30,000 employees access to ChatGPT Work, OpenAI’s AI agent for businesses. The two companies announced the wider partnership this week, TechCrunch reports.
From a 1,000-person test to the whole company
ChatGPT Work launched in July as an AI agent that company teams can use for everyday workflows. Uber first tested it with 1,000 staff earlier this year across finance, operations and product teams.
The most telling detail from the pilot: about 80% of the early users were not engineers, according to Uber’s VP of engineering Sumanth Sukumar. He told TechCrunch they used it to:
- analyse operations data to spot trends and make recommendations,
- translate and adapt training materials for different markets and languages,
- build personal dashboards to manage their daily work.
No fixed playbook yet
Uber has not decided exactly how people should use the tool. “Our approach is to make powerful AI tools available across Uber while giving teams room to experiment,” Sukumar said.
The company has tried a more hands-on approach too. Earlier this year it paired 30 AI engineers with teams around the business and gave them two weeks to automate key parts of those jobs. Uber calls these “AI pods”.
Uber did not say how much the rollout costs. Instead, it plans to watch which workflows employees build and how much they help, and use that to decide how to roll out AI more widely.
The bigger picture
TechCrunch frames the deal as part of OpenAI’s push into business customers, where it competes most directly with Anthropic. OpenAI started out best known for its consumer chatbot, but company-wide deals like this one are where the steady revenue is.
What it means for you
If you work at a large company, expect more “everyone gets an AI agent” announcements like this. The Uber pilot suggests the people who benefit first are not programmers but anyone who spends their day with spreadsheets, reports and documents. Learning to hand off those routine tasks well is quickly becoming a normal job skill.
Sources
- Uber puts all 30,000 employees on ChatGPT Work — TechCrunch