Uber embeds 30 AI engineers in finance and HR teams to build agents that cut some tasks from days to minutes

Uber has embedded 30 of its most AI-proficient engineers with teams in finance, legal, and human resources to develop AI agents that automate manual tasks, Business Insider reported. Chief technology officer Praveen Neppalli Naga posted on X on Tuesday that the engineers spent two weeks observing work in those departments and building the agents.

Uber has run 16 such agentic pods over the past two months.

Financial pacing reports that previously required two days now take 10 minutes with the agents. Allocating capital across the 150 cities where Uber operates, a task that once took 15 hours, now takes 30 minutes. Naga said the engineers had to work directly with employees because process diagrams and documentation proved insufficient.

"You can't automate them effectively by looking at process diagrams or documentation," he wrote. " Uber plans to form a dedicated team to scale the model further. Naga said the team will deeply understand work, redesign it from the ground up, and use AI to change how the business operates.

In May 2026, chief operating officer Andrew Macdonald said it was getting harder to justify the company's AI spending levels. Uber had already maxed out its Claude Code budget for the year by spring 2026.