Uber is deliberately slowing headcount growth to fund increased investment in artificial intelligence, CEO Dara Khosrowshahi disclosed on the company’s first-quarter 2026 earnings call on Wednesday. The shift comes as autonomous AI agents now produce roughly 10% of the company’s code changes, with 95% monthly adoption of AI coding tools among engineers.
AI Gains Outpace Expectations
CFO Balaji Krishnamurthy said Uber had “underestimated the amount of impact the AI tools could have” when it set budgets at the end of 2025. The admission follows reports that Uber burned through its entire 2026 AI budget in just four months after introducing Anthropic’s Claude Code to its roughly 5,000 engineers in December 2025, with monthly costs per engineer running between $500 and $2,000.
Khosrowshahi said human employees still review the AI-generated code before it enters the company’s repositories, but framed the tools as giving employees “superpowers.” He said the company’s goal is for workers to “increase their throughput by 20%, 30%, 50%, 100%” using AI. The company is now redirecting the savings from slower hiring toward AI tools and infrastructure.
Strong Q1 Results Buoy the Strategy
The AI-focused efficiency push accompanies a strong first quarter. Uber reported gross bookings of $53.7 billion, up 25% year-over-year, and revenue of $13.2 billion. Non-GAAP earnings per share rose 44% to $0.72, while adjusted EBITDA climbed 33% to $2.5 billion. The company guided second-quarter gross bookings of $56.25 billion to $57.75 billion, above the consensus estimate of $56.17 billion.
Shares rose roughly 10% in extended trading following the report.
A Broader Industry Signal
Uber’s hiring slowdown reflects a broader corporate reckoning with AI-driven productivity. Earlier this year, Khosrowshahi said he could envision a future where, instead of adding engineering headcount, the company would “add agents and GPUs” instead. His comments on Wednesday’s call were more immediate — the tradeoff between human hires and AI spending is happening now, not five years from now.
The Uber One subscription service, meanwhile, reached 50 million members who account for half of gross bookings across rides and deliveries. The company also said it plans to have autonomous vehicle partnerships operational in up to 15 cities by year-end.
