Uber has a new approach to using AI: “Agentic pods.”
Praveen Neppalli Naga, the ride-hailing company’s tech chief, said in an X post on Tuesday that Uber embedded 30 of its “most AI-proficient engineers” with teams across the company, including finance, legal, and human resources.
Over two weeks, the engineers worked with employees in those departments, observed their work, and created AI agents to help handle tasks, Naga said. Uber has run 16 such Agentic Pods over the past two months, he said.
Many of the duties that Uber’s engineers developed agents for, such as financial pacing reports, involved accessing multiple systems and performing a lot of manual work. The engineers had to work directly with the people responsible for them to understand how to recreate them with AI.
“You can’t automate them effectively by looking at process diagrams or documentation,” Naga said in his post. “You have to understand how the work actually gets done.”
The resulting agents are saving Uber time. Those financial pacing reports can now be made in 10 minutes, down from two days, Naga said. Allocating capital across 150 cities Uber operates in, a task that used to take 15 hours, now takes 30 minutes with AI agents.
Uber’s experience with pods points to a role that’s become a rare bright spot amid industry layoffs. Despite job cuts, tech companies are still hiring forward-deployed engineers, Business Insider reported in May. The job often involves an engineer from an AI company working with employees at a customer firm.
Whether those efficiencies are worth it is another question.
In May, Uber’s chief operating officer, Andrew Macdonald, said on a podcast that it was getting harder for the company to justify spending as much as it has on AI.
Uber, like many tech companies, has ramped up spending on AI. Naga told The Information that Uber maxed out its Claude Code budget for the year this spring. All that spending hasn’t led to a similar increase in “useful” consumer features, though, Macdonald said.
Uber plans to keep using the agentic pod model, Naga said in his X post.
“We’re now forming a dedicated team to scale this further and go deeper,” he said.
“They’ll deeply understand the work, redesign it from the ground up, and use AI to fundamentally change how the business operates,” he added.
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