Uber CEO Dara Khosrowshahi said Thursday that the company's AI investments are delivering incremental gains in conversion and customer experience, even as Uber cuts customer service headcount. On a Q2 2026 earnings call, he said the technology should produce productivity gains that let Uber moderate hiring.
Uber reduced headcount by about 10% to 20% in several organizations during the quarter, including a 10% cut to its customer service workforce last month. Khosrowshahi said the cuts drove modest savings.
"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.
AI examples from the earnings call
Khosrowshahi pointed to Uber Eats' cart assistant, which turns a photo of a recipe or a handwritten ingredient list into a grocery order. Customers who use it build carts roughly twice the size of non-AI carts, he said.
"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 said. "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 process more signals, including history, real-time data, and behavior across the platform, to make better predictions, Khosrowshahi said. That means more relevant ads that convert better, and suggestions like flagging an item that's likely out of stock before a customer checks out.
Uber's AI also predicts where riders want to go. "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.
He cautioned against expecting one large win. "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."
Restructuring before results
When Uber cut 10% of its customer service workforce last month, leadership said the company needed to simplify its organization to use AI better. Kathy Ross, a VP analyst at Gartner, said the cuts look more like preparation than payoff. "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.
Why this matters for customer support professionals
Uber's moves show how AI can change support staffing: companies invest in the technology, measure productivity gains, then adjust headcount. For support professionals, that shifts the skills that matter toward working with AI tools. Training in AI for Customer Support can help with that transition.
Supervisors managing teams through this shift can prepare with the AI Learning Path for Call Center Supervisors.
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