Uber embeds AI engineers in teams to overhaul workflows companywide
Uber is making a big move by placing AI engineers right inside its teams (think finance, legal, marketing, and HR).
Instead of just automating small tasks, they're reworking entire workflows to make things run smoother and faster across the company.
Agentic pods shorten planning and checks
Uber's new "Agentic Pods" (basically focused AI squads) spend two weeks with each department, studying day-to-day work and building custom solutions.
The results are impressive: financial planning now takes around 30 minutes instead of nearly 15 hours, and marketing quality checks have dropped from over two weeks to under one hour.
Approach mirrors forward deployed engineer model
This approach borrows from the "forward-deployed engineer" idea popular in Silicon Valley.
As Uber's CTO Praveen Neppalli Naga puts it, redesigning whole systems with AI unlocks way more productivity than just speeding up individual tasks.