Dive Brief:
- Customer support is a clear example of AI's potential to boost operational efficiency without sacrificing quality, Uber CEO Dara Khosrowshahi said during a Q2 2026 earnings call Thursday.
- Throughout the quarter, Uber cut headcount within a few organizations by about 10% to 20% — including 10% of its customer service workforce last month — driving some modest savings, Khosrowshahi said.
- “The investments we're making in AI, they should result in productivity gains, and that should allow us to be moderating some of the headcount additions,” Khosrowshahi said.
Dive Insight:
Uber is investing heavily in AI throughout its business in an effort to provide incremental gains in conversions and customer experience.
Khosrowshahi pointed to Uber Eat’s cart assistant, which can turn a customer’s picture of a recipe or scribbled down ingredient list into a grocery order.
“The effect there is consumers love it, the ones who use it, but also the size of those carts is often twice the size of non-AI built carts,” Khosrowshahi. “So that's one where your average order size, you kind of drive consumer delight and you are driving average order size as well.”
Larger AI models can also take in a much broader array of signals to make more accurate consumer behavior predictions, according to Khosrowshahi.
“Now these models can take signals based on history,” Khosrowshahi said. “They can take real-time signals, they can take behaviors across the platform. And we can then show those consumers much more relevant information.”
That can ensure customers are shown more highly targeted ads that convert better, helping merchants monetize more effectively, Khosrowshahi said. Or AI can suggest that a particular item in a customer's shopping cart is likely to be out of stock, allowing customers to pick another item in its place and improving that customer’s experience.
Uber’s AI also makes personalized suggestions as to where a rider wants to take an Uber.
“Three-quarters of the time, we're actually guessing where you're going to go based on your history, and we're getting it right and don't require any typing whatsoever,” Khosrowshahi said. “That's another small example of what AI can do. And I wouldn't look for one giant hit from AI. It's going to be thousands of small hits and improvements to our ecosystem that's going to drive, we think, growth for the foreseeable future.”
While these advancements are still early, "all of these either drive conversion or improve the fundamental experience of the consumer,” Khosrowshahi said.
When the company cut 10% of its customer workforce last month, Uber leadership said the company needed to simplify its organization to use AI better.
Such comments indicate that the cuts may have more to do with laying the foundation for future AI success — not that the business has seen grand AI success yet, according to Kathy Ross, a VP analyst at Gartner.
“It’s important to decouple Uber’s headcount reduction and current AI success: This seems more like a business restructuring decision to set themselves up for future AI success,” Ross told CX Dive last month.
