Uber puts 30,000 staff on ChatGPT Work, pilot 80 per cent non-engineers

Any enterprise AI pilot that reports a non-engineer majority is unusual, and Uber told TechCrunch's Lucas Ropek that 80 per cent of the staff in its ChatGPT Work pilot earlier this year fit that description. The ride-share company and OpenAI are now scaling that pilot to Uber's full 30,000-person global workforce.

ChatGPT Work is OpenAI's enterprise-focused agent product. Uber had been running it with 1,000 employees from across finance, operations and product. Sumanth Sukumar, Uber's VP of engineering, told TechCrunch what the pilot group did with the tool: "analyzing complex data from our operations to identify trends and develop recommendations; localizing training materials for different markets and languages; and building personalized interactive dashboards to manage their daily work."

The AI pods

Separate from the ChatGPT Work rollout, Sukumar described a parallel programme the company ran. "Earlier this year we paired 30 AI engineers with teams across Uber and gave them two weeks to automate key parts of their job," he said. "Those 'AI pods' showed us how much opportunity there is when you combine technical expertise with a deep understanding of a particular job."

What Uber has not shared is the spend. Sukumar told TechCrunch the company "didn't disclose how much it's spending on the new rollout of the chatbot" and that evaluation will come from watching how employees actually use it: "the kinds of workflows they develop and how it helps them work more effectively. We'll evaluate those outcomes and use what we learn to guide how we deploy AI across the business."

For OpenAI's enterprise push

TechCrunch's framing of what Uber is for OpenAI, in Lucas Ropek's own words: "OpenAI has moved quickly to scale up its enterprise business as it competes with its chief competitor, Anthropic. Once known largely as a consumer brand, the ChatGPT creator has swiftly gained a loyal following with business customers, while other AI companies have struggled to keep up."

A deployment at 30,000 seats, with the stated pilot shape of mostly non-engineering users, is a different market signal from a developer-focused agent rollout. It is a bet that the agent is useful to the people in a company who do not write software, which is where ChatGPT Work needs to work well if OpenAI's enterprise business is to grow beyond engineering departments.

For a buyer sitting on a similar pilot decision, the useful read is the method rather than the headcount. Uber ran the pilot across finance, operations and product (not an engineering-only beta), paired a separate group of 30 engineers with non-technical teams for a fixed two-week automation sprint, and chose not to pre-commit to a specific evaluation metric. The company is measuring by what workflows the staff build around the tool, which is a slower and messier form of ROI than a per-seat productivity number but matches how an open-ended agent is actually adopted.

Source

Uber puts all 30,000 employees on ChatGPT Work, by Lucas Ropek at TechCrunch.