Uber and OpenAI announced a broader partnership on Thursday, with the ride-share company confirming to TechCrunch that its full global workforce, roughly 30,000 people, will now have access to ChatGPT Work.
OpenAI introduced ChatGPT Work in July as an AI agent aimed at enterprise customers, designed to let corporate teams deploy it across a range of workflows.
Uber first tested the product earlier this year with a group of 1,000 employees. That pilot drew participants from several departments, including finance, operations and product. About 80% of the early users were not engineers, according to Sumanth Sukumar, Uber's VP of engineering.
Sukumar described how those employees put the tool to work. "They used it for a wide range of tasks: analyzing complex data from our operations to identify trends and develop recommendations; localizing training materials for different markets and languages; and building personalized interactive dashboards to manage their daily work," he said.
Even with the company-wide rollout, Uber has not fixed a specific way for staff to use the chatbot. "Our approach is to make powerful AI tools available across Uber while giving teams room to experiment," Sukumar said. He pointed to an earlier initiative in which 30 AI engineers were paired with teams across the company and given two weeks to automate key parts of their jobs. According to Sukumar, those "AI pods" showed how much opportunity exists when technical expertise is combined with a deep understanding of a particular role.
Uber did not say how much it is spending on the expanded deployment. Sukumar said the company plans to monitor how employees use the technology. "We'll look at how employees are using the technology, the kinds of workflows they develop and how it helps them work more effectively," he said, adding that Uber will evaluate those outcomes and use them to guide how it deploys AI across the business. Uber says OpenAI worked closely with it on integrating the chatbot.
The announcement comes as OpenAI moves quickly to grow its enterprise business in competition with its chief rival, Anthropic. The maker of ChatGPT was once known mainly as a consumer brand, but it has rapidly built a loyal following among business customers, while other AI companies have struggled to keep pace.
