After starting the tokenmaxxing panic, Uber's CTO is back with a very different AI story
Uber's CTO is shifting the company's AI strategy by deploying 'Agentic Pods' of engineers directly into internal departments. These teams shadow employees to redesign entire workflows, resulting in significant productivity gains rather than just automating individual tasks.
Why it matters
This approach highlights a growing trend in corporate AI adoption where companies prioritize deep operational integration over simple software implementation to achieve measurable efficiency.
Uber CTO Praveen Neppalli Naga Uber A version of this story originally appeared in the BI Tech Memo newsletter. Sign up for the weekly BI Tech Memo newsletter here . Remember the executive who sparked the tokenmaxxing panic earlier this year after saying Uber had already blown through its 2026 budget for Anthropic's Claude Code? He's back with a more interesting lesson about AI. Uber CTO Praveen Neppalli Naga says the company has started sending its best AI engineers into departments like finance, legal, marketing, customer support, HR, and procurement to study how people actually work before building AI tools with them. He called these two-week teams "Agentic Pods." Engineers spend the first few days shadowing employees, learning every step of a workflow, then quickly build and test software to improve it. The results are striking. One financial planning process dropped from 15 hours to 30 minutes.
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