AI isn’t just arranging rides or driving cars at Uber — it’s also imitating CEO Dara Khosrowshahi.
Some Uber employees have created an AI version of their company’s top executive, Khosrowshahi said on an episode of The Diary of a CEO podcast hosted by Steven Bartlett.
“One of my team members told me that some teams have built a ‘Dara AI,'” Khosrowshahi said. “They basically make the presentation to the Dara AI as a prep for making a presentation to me.”
The AI clone helps employees then make changes to their slides and other aspects of their presentation, he said. “They have Dara AI to tune their prep,” Khosrowshahi said.
While it’s not clear how widespread the use of the CEO bot is within Uber’s corporate offices, it’s the latest example of employees using AI in new ways to help prepare for high-pressure moments in the workplace.
It also raises a question about how high up the organizational chart AI will be able to move as its use expands at major companies. Even some CEOs, such as Google’s Sundar Pichai, have said that AI could replace them eventually.
“Are you concerned that they’re going to show Dara AI to the board?” Bartlett asked on the podcast, eliciting laughter from both men.
While AI models can process large amounts of data, Khosrowshahi said that they still struggle to process and make choices based on new information — something that executives like him have to do.
“When the models can learn in real-time, that is the point at which I’m going to think that, yeah, we are all replaceable,” he said.
Uber relies on AI for much of its business, including helping run its mainstay ride-hailing business. It’s also expanding new use cases, such as its AI Solutions division, which pays independent contractors to train AI for clients.
For Uber’s rank-and-file workers, AI could lead to more jobs. About 30% of Uber’s coders, for example, are “power users” of AI, Khosrowshahi said.
If AI makes Uber’s engineers each 25% more efficient, the CEO said he’d want “to hire more engineers, because I want to go faster.”
AI could also limit head count, he added.
“I may not decide to add engineering headcount,” Khosrowshahi said. “At that point, instead of adding an engineer, I should add agents and buy some more GPUs from Nvidia.”
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