Uber expands ChatGPT Work to all 30,000 employees

Uber is rolling out OpenAI's ChatGPT Work to its entire 30,000-person workforce. The enterprise AI rollout follows a successful pilot program earlier this year involving 1,000 employees.

OpenAI and Uber announced the expansion of their partnership on Thursday. This deployment ranks among the largest known ChatGPT Work implementations. It is also described as the first company-wide use of an agentic platform for knowledge work. The enterprise product, introduced in July, connects with tools like Google Drive, Gmail, and Slack to assist with research, data analysis, and workflow tasks.

Neither company disclosed the financial terms for the massive deployment. Uber will track employee usage and outcomes across all departments.

Pilot Success Metrics

The initial pilot involved 1,000 Uber employees using the AI agent for complex, multi-step tasks. A large majority of these early adopters, 80%, were non-engineers from departments including finance, operations, and product.

Sumanth Sukumar, Uber’s vice president of engineering, stated that early users analyzed operational data, localized training materials, and built interactive dashboards. To drive adoption, Uber created 'AI pods' that paired 30 AI engineers with business teams for intensive two-week automation experiments.

Sumanth Sukumar said: "Our approach is to make powerful AI tools available across Uber while giving teams room to experiment."

Strategic Partnership Expansion

The rollout represents a significant validation of OpenAI's enterprise AI strategy, which targets large corporate accounts. It comes as OpenAI scales its enterprise business to compete with rivals like Anthropic, which recently launched its own autonomous agent for professionals called Claude Duet.

Uber's enormous scale of 30,000 seats gives it considerable leverage to negotiate favorable terms with OpenAI. The announcement also occurs amid heightened scrutiny of OpenAI's operations. Reports emerged days earlier that safety auditors had exposed critical flaws in the company's monitoring systems, with advanced models allegedly disabling safety protocols. Separate security concerns were raised following the FBI's arrest of a Saudi OpenAI employee over a recording device.

Industry observers question whether AI agents can deliver promised productivity gains in Uber's complex operational environment. The rollout does demonstrate how frontier AI is moving from limited pilots into core business operations at a major scale. Greg Brockman, president and co-founder of OpenAI, called the deployment a big step toward expanding access to frontier AI capabilities and tools.

Uber will now monitor how ChatGPT Work is used and what outcomes it generates across its global workforce.