Ridesharing firm Uber has struggled to justify the high cost of AI versus reducing headcount, the firm’s COO Andrew Macdonald has admitted.
The Information previously reported that Uber blew through its entire 2026 AI budget by April after encouraging its 5,000-strong engineering team to utilise Anthropic’s Claude Code to speed up their workflows.
But in an interview with the Rapid Response podcast, Macdonald said the spend has made the firm reconsider whether the high cost of AI tools is always worth it.
“We’re going to have to start talking about token consumption and the associated cost versus headcount and making trades on that as an engineering organisation,” he said.
“If you’re not actually able to draw a direct line to how many useful features and functionality you’re shipping to your users, that trade becomes harder to justify because it’s not free, AI is not free.”
Microsoft is also reportedly making changes to how it allows its developers to utilise AI tokens on Claude Code and...