Uber is handing ChatGPT Work to everyone on the payroll. The company told TechCrunch on Thursday that its full global workforce, some 30,000 people, will now use OpenAI’s enterprise AI agent.
That is a big jump from where things started. Earlier this year, only 1,000 Uber employees were testing the tool.
From 1,000 testers to the whole company
The announcement expands an existing partnership between Uber and OpenAI. Under the new arrangement, ChatGPT Work becomes standard equipment across Uber’s global operations rather than a perk for a select test group.
OpenAI introduced ChatGPT Work in July 2026, with the launch landing around July 9. The company pitched it as an AI agent built for enterprise teams to plug into their day-to-day workflows.
According to the research findings on the deployment, the tool covers several core tasks:
- Research
- Document creation
- Project management
- Task automation
The scale-up is roughly 30 times the size of the original pilot. Uber went from a 1,000-person experiment to a deployment covering approximately 30,000 staff.
A partnership with a short but busy history
The Uber and OpenAI relationship is not new, though it is still fairly young. The partnership was first publicly highlighted on May 6, 2026.
At that stage, the focus was outward-facing. The two companies emphasized using AI-assisted tools to improve the experience for Uber’s drivers and riders.
CEO Dara Khosrowshahi has been vocal about this direction. He has repeatedly stressed that using AI is becoming a necessity inside the company, not an optional extra.
Khosrowshahi has referenced the need for AI adoption across Uber’s roughly 30,000 employees since April 2025.
The workforce context
The timing deserves attention. The deployment comes against a backdrop of significant workforce changes at Uber.
About 3,300 Uber roles were cut in September 2026. The research findings link Uber’s growing internal use of AI to the company’s broader efficiency strategy, which has included those reductions.
It is worth being precise about what that connection does and does not mean. The available information places the AI rollout and the job cuts within the same efficiency push, but it does not state that ChatGPT Work directly replaced any specific roles.
What this means
For OpenAI, Uber is a valuable reference customer. Landing a full-company deployment at a well-known global brand gives its enterprise pitch real weight with other large firms weighing similar moves.
Pilots are cheap to start and easy to abandon. A rollout to approximately 30,000 employees is a much stronger endorsement than a trial, because it means a company has decided the tool is worth building processes around.
For Uber, the bet is about productivity at scale. If the agent can genuinely speed up research, documentation, project tracking and routine tasks, the gains could add up across tens of thousands of people.
Disclosure: This article was edited by Diego Almada Lopez. For more information on how we create and review content, see our Editorial Policy.