Uber and OpenAI announced on Thursday that the ride‑share company will roll out ChatGPT Work to its entire global staff of about 30,000 people. The AI‑focused tool, launched in July as an enterprise‑grade assistant, was first tested by Uber earlier this year with a pilot group of 1,000 employees from finance, operations, product and other departments. According to Sumanth Sukumar, Uber’s vice president of engineering, roughly 80 percent of those early users were non‑engineers.
“They used it for a wide range of tasks, from analyzing complex operational data to spot trends and make recommendations, to localizing training materials for different markets and languages, and to building personalized interactive dashboards for daily work,” Sukumar told TechCrunch.
While the company is now adopting the chatbot across the board, it has not yet defined a single use case for all staff. “Our approach is to make powerful AI tools available across Uber while giving teams room to experiment,” he said. Sukumar added that earlier in the year Uber paired 30 AI engineers with various teams for a two‑week sprint to automate key parts of their jobs. Those “AI pods,” he noted, demonstrated the potential of combining technical expertise with deep domain knowledge.
Uber did not disclose the cost of the full rollout. Instead, the firm plans to monitor how employees interact with the platform, the workflows they create and the productivity gains they achieve. “We’ll look at how employees are using the technology, 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,” Sukumar said.
OpenAI worked closely with Uber to integrate the chatbot, as the AI company accelerates its push into the enterprise market to compete with rivals such as Anthropic. Once known primarily as a consumer brand, OpenAI has quickly built a strong base of business customers, while other AI firms have struggled to keep pace.