Uber COO questions AI spending after burning 2026 budget in 4 months
Original: Uber burned through its entire 2026 AI budget in four months. Now its COO is questioning whether it's worth it
Why This Matters
Highlights growing challenge of justifying enterprise AI costs despite widespread adoption
Uber COO Andrew Macdonald expressed difficulty justifying the company's AI spending after burning through its entire 2026 AI coding tools budget in just four months. He said it's hard to connect increased Claude Code usage to useful consumer features.
Uber president and COO Andrew Macdonald said on the Rapid Response podcast that the company struggles to draw connections between rising Claude Code usage and consumer-facing innovations. 'That link is not there yet,' he said, noting difficulty linking AI tool statistics to producing 25% more useful consumer features. The comments follow reports that Uber exhausted its 2026 AI coding budget in four months after incentivizing employee adoption through internal leaderboards. CEO Dara Khosrowshahi said 10% of committed code is built by autonomous agents, with AI tools used across legal, marketing, and development teams. Microsoft also reportedly canceled most Claude Code licenses, moving engineers to GitHub Copilot CLI instead.