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. Financial reports fell from two days to 10 minutes. Marketing quality checks shrank from two weeks to less than an hour.
Naga said the biggest gains rarely come from speeding up one task. They come from redesigning an entire workflow around AI, eliminating unnecessary approvals, replacing old software, and helping people make decisions faster. You can see this at work here, too.
Several tech executives compared the approach to Silicon Valley's fast-growing "forward-deployed engineer" role. The twist? Instead of sending these AI experts to customers, Uber is deploying them inside its own business to find the next wave of productivity gains.
Peter Wilczynski, chief product officer at Vantortech, jokingly dubbed the role the "Rearward Deployed Engineer," describing engineers embedded deep inside corporate operations to redesign entire workflows around AI rather than simply speeding up individual tasks.
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Alistair Barr is the author of Business Insider's Tech Memo newsletter. Sign up here. Before that, he was BI's Global Tech Editor and the Big Tech team leader at Bloomberg, following a reporting career at The Wall Street Journal, USA Today, Reuters, and MarketWatch. Alistair won a Gerald Loeb Award in 2007 for coverage of short selling and was a finalist in 2013 for scoops on the Facebook IPO. More recently, he won a 2024 San Francisco Press Club award for commentary. Got a tip? Reach out using the secure messaging app Signal (+1 415-341-4927) or via email on [email protected].ExpertiseAlistair oversees all things Big Tech, along with startups and venture capital. He writes analysis and columns about topics including generative AI, large language models, cloud computing, semiconductors, online search, e-commerce, EVs, robotics, and autonomous vehicles.Popular StoriesArtificial Intelligence:It's getting harder to make big leaps at the frontier of AIOpenAI's AI-adjusted earnings numbers have echoes of Groupon and WeWorkDeath by LLM: Stack Overflow's decline, and its plan to survive, shows the future of free online data in an AI worldCloud computing:Amazon dominated the first cloud era. The AI boom has kicked off Cloud 2.0, and the company doesn't have a head start this time.In cloud, there's AI (which is hot) and everything else (which is not)Chips:Why Intel is still so important: Real countries have fabsApple's made-in-the-USA chips signal a turnaround for the US's big semiconductor betEVs and Tesla:Tesla's AI supercomputer has a Silicon Valley town rushing to meet surging electricity demandTesla's Cybertruck is outselling almost every other EV in the USOnline Search:Google is losing its status as a verbA simple way to fix search: Bright pink ads
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