Uber axed 10% of its customer service workforce on Wednesday, the first time the company has explicitly linked a round of layoffs to its artificial intelligence push. The cuts landed inside the community operations team, and remote workers on that team were also told to pack up and relocate to a hub office under the company's return-to-office mandate.
Megha Yethatika, Uber's VP of global community operations, sent a memo to her division explaining that the organization had grown "too complex and siloed." She said the team had made real progress deploying AI but needed cleaner processes to build on before scaling further. "We cannot scale frontier technology on top of fragmented processes," she wrote, according to a memo reported by Bloomberg. An Uber spokesperson confirmed the company wants to "simplify operations, strengthen in-person collaboration, and continue to embrace AI."
Second cut in two months
This is not Uber's first personnel move this summer. Back in June, the company trimmed 23% of its people division, which amounted to under 1% of its roughly 34,000 global employees, shortly after a new president took the helm. Wednesday's action is harder to frame as a reorganization footnote: tying job cuts directly to AI efficiency is a different kind of signal.
Uber had already said in May it would slow hiring because AI was handling more work internally. The company still lists over 500 open roles, engineers for its robotaxi partnerships among them, which suggests the workforce strategy is less about shrinking and more about rebalancing toward automation-heavy functions.
The broader picture makes Uber look less like an outlier. Through June, AI was cited in 101,743 US job cut announcements, roughly 23% of all layoffs tracked by outplacement firm Challenger, Gray and Christmas. AI has topped the stated reasons for US job cuts for four consecutive months. Jeff Bezos, for one, is not worried: he recently argued that AI will create labor scarcity rather than displacement, reshaping household economics in the process. That debate is nowhere near settled, but companies cutting support roles in favor of chatbots are not waiting for a verdict.
This article is for informational purposes only and does not constitute financial advice or an investment recommendation.
