Milk Road AI (@MilkRoadAI) “Uber's CEO said it himself that they blew through their entire 2026 AI budget in” — TopicDigg

Uber's CEO said it himself that they blew through their entire 2026 AI budget in a single quarter (Save this). And today they cut 23% of the people who used to do what AI now does. These two facts are not separate stories but rather the same story. Earlier this year, Dara Khosrowshahi explained exactly what was happening inside Uber's engineering org. The company introduced Anthropic's Claude Code to engineers in late 2025, adoption reached 32% by February, 84% were classified as agentic coding users by March and by April 95% of engineers were using AI tools monthly. Roughly 70% of committed code was AI generated and round 11% of real time backend updates were being deployed by autonomous agents with no human in the loop. The annual AI budget was gone in four months and Dara's response was not to slow down adoption but rather to slow down hiring. When each engineer is producing materially more output per hour, you need fewer engineers to hit the same targets. And when AI handles the work that used to require people to hire, onboard, and manage those engineers, the HR and people operations layer beneath them, that layer contracts too. Today's announcement is that 23% of Uber's People and Places division is gone. Uber's spokesperson said the cuts are unrelated to AI but that framing does not hold up to the sequence of events. IBM understood this two years ago, when 94% of typical HR questions are answered by an AI agent, the HR Business Partner role collapses for everyone except the most senior strategic functions. The budget that used to fund that team gets reallocated to engineering and sales, the two functions that remain bottlenecked by human judgment rather than human volume. This is the pattern that will repeat across every major enterprise over the next 18 months.