Uber moves all 30,000 employees onto OpenAI's ChatGPT Work

Uber and OpenAI announced on 22 October 2026 that Uber is rolling out ChatGPT Work to its entire global workforce, which Uber told TechCrunch is some 30,000 people. OpenAI's announcement says teams will use it to research, analyse data, create presentations and complete complex workflows. TechCrunch describes ChatGPT Work as an enterprise-focused AI agent that OpenAI introduced in July 2026.

What the pilot looked like

According to TechCrunch, Uber first piloted ChatGPT Work with 1,000 employees earlier this year, drawn from departments including finance, operations and product. Sumanth Sukumar, Uber's VP of engineering, said about 80% of those early adopters were non-engineers.

He listed three uses: analysing complex operations data to identify trends and develop recommendations, localising training materials for different markets and languages, and building personalised interactive dashboards to manage daily work. These are Uber's descriptions; no usage numbers or time savings were published.

How Uber says it will decide what comes next

Sukumar said Uber's approach is to make powerful AI tools available while giving teams room to experiment. As an earlier example he described pairing 30 AI engineers with teams across Uber and giving them two weeks to automate key parts of their job; he said those "AI pods" showed how much opportunity there is when technical expertise meets deep knowledge of a job.

For the rollout itself, he said Uber will look at how employees use the technology and what workflows they build, evaluate those outcomes and use them to guide how AI is deployed across the business. In other words, the company has not yet fixed what ChatGPT Work is for.

The catch

This is a vendor-announced rollout told through the customer's spokesperson, and it leaves out the numbers a rollout plan needs. Uber did not disclose what it is spending, according to TechCrunch. Neither source describes data-access controls, approval steps for what the agent can do, or a success metric beyond usage. The 80% figure describes who volunteered for a 1,000-person pilot, not how the tool performed.

What to do

• If you are scoping a company-wide agent rollout, copy the sequence, not the headcount: a pilot of about 3% of staff (1,000 of 30,000 at Uber) that deliberately includes non-engineers.
• Decide before launch which usage measures you will review, such as workflows built and by which teams, since Uber says that is how it will judge the rollout.
• Ask your vendor for the figures this announcement omits: price per seat or per task, and the access controls that apply to connected data.