Uber and OpenAI announced on 22 October 2026 that Uber would expand ChatGPT Work to its global workforce of about 30,000 employees, after piloting the tool with 1,000 people earlier in the year, TechCrunch reported. The decision takes OpenAI’s enterprise AI agent, introduced in July for corporate workflows, beyond a trial involving staff in several Uber departments.
Key points
- Uber is extending ChatGPT Work from a 1,000-person pilot to about 30,000 employees globally.
- About 80% of early adopters were non-engineers, Uber’s engineering vice-president said.
- Uber plans to assess how employees use the tool and what its workflows achieve.
Uber’s 1,000-person pilot crossed departments
The pilot included employees in finance, operations and product. Sumanth Sukumar, Uber’s vice-president of engineering, told TechCrunch that about 80% of its early adopters were non-engineers. That mix put the tool in the hands of staff working outside software engineering before Uber decided to extend it across the company.
According to Sukumar, participants analysed data from Uber’s operations to find trends and develop recommendations. They also adapted training materials for different markets and languages, and built interactive dashboards tailored to their daily work. Those are the uses Uber identified from the pilot, rather than a fixed set of tasks for every employee in the wider deployment.
Sukumar described the approach as making AI tools available throughout Uber while leaving teams room to experiment. His examples span data analysis, training and dashboards, placing the expansion across different types of work. Uber says OpenAI worked closely with it to integrate ChatGPT Work.
Uber assigned 30 engineers to AI pods
Uber ran a separate exercise earlier in 2026 that paired 30 AI engineers with teams around the company. The teams had two weeks to work on automating important parts of their jobs, Sukumar said. Uber called the exercise “AI pods”.
The pairing gave employees working in particular roles direct access to engineers for a short period. Sukumar said the exercise brought technical expertise together with a detailed understanding of those jobs. The company’s account of the pods describes an attempt to develop workflows with teams, alongside the broader trial of ChatGPT Work among staff from multiple departments.
The 1,000-person pilot tested ChatGPT Work. Uber also ran a two-week AI pods exercise pairing engineers with teams to automate parts of their jobs. Sukumar’s examples from the pilot concern work employees carried out with the tool. His account of the pods concerns teams trying to automate parts of their jobs over two weeks.
ChatGPT Work spending and employee use
The expansion moves ChatGPT Work from a limited pilot to availability across Uber’s global workforce, but Sukumar said the company would examine what employees do with the technology as they begin to develop workflows.
OpenAI introduced ChatGPT Work in July as an agent for use in corporate workflows. The Uber expansion gives OpenAI a customer deploying the product across departments rather than confining it to the initial group. OpenAI is competing with Anthropic for enterprise customers.
Sukumar said Uber would look at employees’ patterns of use, the workflows they create and whether the tool helps them work more effectively. Uber will evaluate those outcomes to guide how it deploys AI across the business, he said.
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