Uber President and COO Andrew Macdonald is “tempted to say” the ride-hailing giant will have fewer employees in five years, but don’t hold him to it.
“I think if you took everything Uber does today and held it static and said in five years you’re going to need more or less people, I’d say, ‘Well, we could do everything we do today with less people in five years because of the power of AI, but we’re going to be doing a whole bunch of new interesting stuff,'” Macdonald said during a recent appearance on venture capitalist Harry Stebbings’ “20VC” podcast. “And so maybe we need more employees to do that stuff.”
Macdonald talked about how the company has a “disproportionate” head count in roles that seem ripe to be augmented and one day potentially replaced by AI.
“When you look at the largest teams from a numbers-of-people perspective, you do have disproportionate head count in like more producing type functions, whether it’s customer support, sales, or content production, or analytics, where you’re producing reports and dashboards and these sorts of things,” he said. “And I think those sorts of functions lend themselves well to first augmentation by AI, and eventually, I think at least partial replacement by AI.”
Macdonald, who is also Uber’s chief operating officer, said the reason he’s cautious about saying Uber will reduce its head count is that early AI workforce predictions haven’t come to pass.
“The reason I won’t emphatically state that is because I think that’s sort of been proven wrong the last few years as AI has rolled out and employment in companies continues to grow,” he said.
As for its last five years, Uber’s head count overall has increased 54.4%, according to filings with the Securities and Exchange Commission. In July, Uber said it was laying off about 10% of its community operations team, which a company spokesperson previously told Business Insider was done to “simplify operations, strengthen in-person collaboration, and continue to embrace AI.”
The ride-hailing company has about 36,600 global employees, according to its most recent filing.
A return to ROI
Much of the discussion returns to the question of return on investment. In May, Macdonald’s comments about Uber not seeing enough return on investment for its AI spending went viral and were dissected across Silicon Valley and Wall Street.
Macdonald said that people didn’t understand the nuance of what he was saying.
“I think AI skeptics were sort of like, ‘See the Uber COO is saying there’s no return on AI’, which is obviously not what I was saying,” he said. “On the other side, there was sort of this, if you were a fundamentalist AI evangelist, you were saying, this guy has no idea what he’s talking about.”
Uber is seeing ROI, Macdonald said. He listed a handful of examples, including reducing the time it takes to make financial forecasts and the turnaround time for marketing quality assurance. What remains difficult, he said, is quantifying it all.
“The natural question is, ‘OK, great, how many of those people can I take out of my organization, so that I get the cost back and that flow through to the bottom line, or I can put it into other things?” he said. “But formulaically doing that is really hard.”
Measuring is difficult, Macdonald said, because when AI reduces the time required for a task, another task takes its place.
“Drawing the direct line between ‘I transformed this process and therefore I need two less operations analysts’ is really tough to do,” he said.
