Uber ChatGPT Work is now available to every Uber employee worldwide, the company and OpenAI announced Thursday. The rollout covers about 30,000 workers, following an earlier pilot that involved 1,000 employees and revealed that most early users were not engineers.
What the pilot revealed
Earlier this year, Uber tested ChatGPT Work across its finance, operations, and product departments. Sumanth Sukumar, Uber’s vice president of engineering, told TechCrunch that roughly 80% of the pilot participants were non-engineers. Their tasks included analyzing data, localizing training materials, and building dashboards.
The composition of that group matters. It suggests the tool found traction beyond technical teams, among employees whose daily work involves information handling rather than software development. Uber has not prescribed exactly how employees should use ChatGPT Work now that access is universal.
An experimental approach, with AI pods
Rather than issuing a company-wide mandate, Uber is treating the deployment as an open experiment. Sukumar said teams are being given room to try the tool in their own workflows. To support that, Uber paired 30 AI engineers with teams for two-week automation sprints, an arrangement the company calls AI pods. Sukumar described the pods as a way to combine technical expertise with job-specific knowledge.
That structure reflects a broader question facing large employers: how to move AI from isolated tests into everyday work without forcing a single method. Uber’s answer, at least for now, is to let usage patterns emerge and then study them.
Tracking usage, not disclosing costs
Uber will monitor how employees use ChatGPT Work and which workflows they adopt. According to Sukumar, the company will evaluate outcomes to guide future AI deployment. The financial terms of the rollout were not disclosed, and Uber has not said how much it is spending on the expansion.
ChatGPT Work launched in July as an enterprise AI agent, and OpenAI assisted Uber with integrating the chatbot. The partnership expansion marks a significant enterprise customer win for OpenAI as it scales its business offerings against competitors such as Anthropic.
Why the full rollout matters
Deploying an AI agent to 30,000 employees is a substantial test of whether such tools can deliver value across a workforce that includes many non-technical roles. The pilot’s 80% non-engineer share offers an early signal that adoption may not be limited to engineering teams.
Still, key questions remain unanswered: the exact cost, the productivity gains from full deployment, and which departments will use the tool most. Uber’s decision to track usage and workflows suggests the company is treating the rollout as a learning phase rather than a finished solution. For now, the scale of the deployment makes Uber a closely watched case in the enterprise AI market.
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