{"id":3457,"date":"2026-08-18T14:08:12","date_gmt":"2026-08-18T14:08:12","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/americanhomejournals.com\/?p=3457"},"modified":"2026-08-18T14:08:12","modified_gmt":"2026-08-18T14:08:12","slug":"uber-coo-is-tempted-to-say-the-company-will-have-fewer-employees-in-five-years","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/americanhomejournals.com\/?p=3457","title":{"rendered":"Uber COO is \u2018tempted to say\u2019 the company will have fewer employees in five years"},"content":{"rendered":"<section>\n<p>Uber President and COO Andrew Macdonald is &#8220;tempted to say&#8221; the ride-hailing giant will have fewer employees in five years, but don&#8217;t hold him to it.<\/p>\n<p>Read more <a href=\"https:\/\/americanhomejournals.com\/?p=3455\">This doctor turned a stroke at 24 into a $75 million bet on smart rings. Read his pitch deck.<\/a><\/p>\n<p>&#8220;I think if you took everything Uber does today and held it static and said in five years you&#8217;re going to need more or less people, I&#8217;d say, &#8216;Well, we could do everything we do today with less people in five years because of the power of AI, but we&#8217;re going to be doing a whole bunch of new interesting stuff,'&#8221; Macdonald said during a recent appearance on venture capitalist Harry Stebbings&#8217; &#8220;20VC&#8221; podcast. &#8220;And so maybe we need more employees to do that stuff.&#8221;<\/p>\n<div>\n<div><iframe allow=\"accelerometer; autoplay; clipboard-write; encrypted-media; gyroscope; picture-in-picture; web-share\" allowfullscreen=\"\" data-root-margin=\"100% 0px\" data-src=\"https:\/\/www.youtube.com\/embed\/sCa1MWB9Gcc?feature=oembed\" frameborder=\"0\" height=\"315\" referrerpolicy=\"strict-origin-when-cross-origin\" title=\"Uber President on Travis, China &amp; Self-Driving | Why Autonomy Is Existential | How to Beat DoorDash\" width=\"560\"><\/iframe><\/div>\n<\/div>\n<p>Macdonald talked about how the company has a &#8220;disproportionate&#8221; head count in roles that seem ripe to be augmented and one day potentially replaced by AI.<\/p>\n<p>&#8220;When you look at the largest teams from a numbers-of-people perspective, you do have disproportionate head count in like more producing type functions, whether it&#8217;s customer support, sales, or content production, or analytics, where you&#8217;re producing reports and dashboards and these sorts of things,&#8221; he said. &#8220;And I think those sorts of functions lend themselves well to first augmentation by AI, and eventually, I think at least partial replacement by AI.&#8221;<\/p>\n<p>Macdonald, who is also Uber&#8217;s chief operating officer, said the reason he&#8217;s cautious about saying Uber will reduce its head count is that early AI workforce predictions haven&#8217;t come to pass.<\/p>\n<p>&#8220;The reason I won&#8217;t emphatically state that is because I think that&#8217;s sort of been proven wrong the last few years as AI has rolled out and employment in companies continues to grow,&#8221; he said.<\/p>\n<p>As for its last five years, Uber&#8217;s head count overall has increased 54.4%, according to filings with the Securities and Exchange Commission. In July, Uber said it was laying off about 10% of its community operations team, which a company spokesperson previously told Business Insider was done to &#8220;simplify operations, strengthen in-person collaboration, and continue to embrace AI.&#8221;<\/p>\n<p>The ride-hailing company has about 36,600 global employees, according to its most recent filing.<\/p>\n<p>Read more <a href=\"https:\/\/americanhomejournals.com\/?p=3453\">\u2018Crazy overvalued\u2019: Scott Galloway says SpaceX is a \u2018$10 to $30 stock\u2019<\/a><\/p>\n<h2>A return to ROI<\/h2>\n<p>Much of the discussion returns to the question of return on investment. In May, Macdonald&#8217;s comments about Uber not seeing enough return on investment for its AI spending went viral and were dissected across Silicon Valley and Wall Street.<\/p>\n<p>Macdonald said that people didn&#8217;t understand the nuance of what he was saying.<\/p>\n<p>&#8220;I think AI skeptics were sort of like, &#8216;See the Uber COO is saying there&#8217;s no return on AI&#8217;, which is obviously not what I was saying,&#8221; he said. &#8220;On the other side, there was sort of this, if you were a fundamentalist AI evangelist, you were saying, this guy has no idea what he&#8217;s talking about.&#8221;<\/p>\n<p>Uber is seeing ROI, Macdonald said. He listed a handful of examples, including reducing the time it takes to make financial forecasts and the turnaround time for marketing quality assurance. What remains difficult, he said, is quantifying it all.<\/p>\n<p>&#8220;The natural question is, &#8216;OK, great, how many of those people can I take out of my organization, so that I get the cost back and that flow through to the bottom line, or I can put it into other things?&#8221; he said. &#8220;But formulaically doing that is really hard.&#8221;<\/p>\n<p>Measuring is difficult, Macdonald said, because when AI reduces the time required for a task, another task takes its place.<\/p>\n<p>&#8220;Drawing the direct line between &#8216;I transformed this process and therefore I need two less operations analysts&#8217; is really tough to do,&#8221; he said.<\/p>\n<p>Read more <a href=\"https:\/\/americanhomejournals.com\/?p=3451\">Unitree unveils a robot it says can run faster than Usain Bolt ahead of its IPO<\/a><\/p>\n<\/section>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Uber chief operating officer Andrew Macdonald sees roles that are ripe for AI augmentation but thinks the company could grow in other ways.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":3456,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[4],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-3457","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-tech"],"yoast_head":"<!-- This site is optimized with the Yoast SEO plugin v27.6 - 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