Uber Gives ChatGPT to All 30,000 Employees: It Won't Say the Price, and the Plan Is for Teams to "Experiment"

Uber is expanding its partnership with OpenAI: all of the company's employees worldwide, around 30,000 people, will now work with ChatGPT Work. That is the enterprise AI agent OpenAI unveiled in July, which lets corporate teams automate their own workflows.

The decision did not come overnight. Earlier this year Uber tested the tool on 1,000 employees from finance, operations and product development. According to engineering vice-president Sumant Sukumar, about 80 percent of the first users were not engineers. They used it to analyse operational data and spot trends, to adapt training materials for different markets and languages, and to build their own interactive dashboards.

The interesting part is that Uber still doesn't know exactly what it will use it for. "Our approach is to make powerful AI tools available across the whole company and give teams room to experiment," Sukumar says. As an example he cites "AI squads": 30 AI engineers spread across teams, with a two-week deadline to automate key parts of their colleagues' work. When someone automates part of your job in two weeks, what's left of it?

How much all this costs, Uber won't say. Instead of a number, Sukumar offers a promise: the company will track how people use the tool, what workflows they build and how much it helps them, and will decide on that basis how to roll out AI further. In other words, buy it for everyone first, then measure whether it was worth it. Uber adds that OpenAI staff worked closely with them on integrating the chatbot.

For OpenAI this is more than just another deal. A company long known mainly as a consumer brand is now rapidly building an enterprise business, in a direct race with its main rival Anthropic. An entire 30,000-person company on one platform is advertising money can't buy. The question remains what the employees themselves get out of it, besides one more tool that will track how they work.