Uber Puts Its Entire 30,000-Person Workforce on ChatGPT Work

Uber is handing ChatGPT Work to every one of its roughly 30,000 employees, the company told TechCrunch, marking a major expansion of its partnership with OpenAI that the two companies announced Thursday.

ChatGPT Work is OpenAI's enterprise-focused AI agent, launched in July for corporate teams to plug into their daily workflows. Uber didn't jump straight to a full rollout — it started by piloting the tool with about 1,000 employees earlier this year, spread across departments like finance, operations, and product. The company is now expanding that test group to its entire global workforce.

What's notable about the pilot isn't just its size, but who was using it. According to Sumanth Sukumar, Uber's VP of engineering, roughly 80% of the early adopters were non-engineers. That's a meaningful detail: enterprise AI tools are often framed around technical teams, but Uber's early experience suggests the bigger impact showed up elsewhere in the business.

Sukumar described a fairly wide range of use cases emerging from that group. Employees used ChatGPT Work to dig through operational data for trends and recommendations, to localize training materials into different languages for various markets, and to build interactive dashboards for managing their own workloads. None of that is flashy, but it reflects the kind of grinding, cross-departmental work that actually eats up time at a company Uber's size.

No fixed playbook yet

Despite committing to a company-wide rollout, Uber hasn't locked in a specific strategy for how employees should use the tool. Sukumar framed the approach as deliberately open-ended: give people access to powerful AI tools, then let individual teams figure out what to do with them.

"Our approach is to make powerful AI tools available across Uber while giving teams room to experiment," he told TechCrunch.

As an example, he pointed to an earlier internal experiment where Uber paired 30 AI engineers with teams across the company and gave them two weeks to automate pieces of their own jobs. Uber is calling these "AI pods," and Sukumar said they demonstrated how much can get automated when technical know-how is combined with someone who actually understands the job being automated. It's a small detail, but it hints at how Uber is thinking about this rollout less as a top-down mandate and more as a company-wide experiment it's trying to learn from in real time.

That learning-as-you-go approach extends to how Uber plans to measure success. The company didn't disclose what it's spending on the ChatGPT Work rollout, and it hasn't set rigid metrics for ROI. Instead, Sukumar said Uber will track how employees actually use the tool, what workflows they build around it, and whether it measurably helps them work more effectively — then use those findings to shape how AI gets deployed more broadly across the business. Uber said OpenAI worked closely with the company on integrating the chatbot.

A bigger pattern for OpenAI

The Uber deal fits into a broader push by OpenAI to build out its enterprise business, an area where the company is racing against Anthropic, its closest rival. OpenAI built its name as a consumer product through ChatGPT, but it has moved fast to court corporate customers, and by TechCrunch's account it's pulling ahead of other AI companies trying to do the same thing.

For OpenAI, a company-wide deployment at a 30,000-person global operation like Uber is a concrete proof point it can point to when selling ChatGPT Work to other large employers. For Uber, the real test comes next: whether giving nearly its entire workforce access to the same AI tool, with no fixed rulebook for how to use it, produces the kind of efficiency gains that justify going all-in rather than staying in pilot mode. Sukumar's comments suggest Uber itself doesn't have that answer yet — it's planning to find out by watching what its own employees do with it.