Uber rolls out OpenAI's ChatGPT Work to its entire 30,000-person workforce

Uber goes company-wide with ChatGPT Work

Uber is handing OpenAI's ChatGPT Work to its entire global workforce of roughly 30,000 people, the company told TechCrunch, in an expansion of its partnership with OpenAI announced Thursday. The rollout ranks among the largest deployments to date of an enterprise AI agent, and it turns what began as an internal experiment into standard tooling across one of the world's biggest ride-hailing companies.

ChatGPT Work is the enterprise-facing agent product OpenAI introduced in July, designed so corporate teams can apply it across a range of workflows rather than to a single task.

The pilot behind the decision

According to TechCrunch, Uber did not leap straight to a full rollout. The company first tested ChatGPT Work with 1,000 employees earlier this year, drawing testers from departments such as finance, operations and product. Sumanth Sukumar, Uber's VP of engineering, told TechCrunch that about 80% of those early users were not engineers.

The pilot group put the tool to varied use, Sukumar said: analyzing complex operational data to spot trends and shape recommendations, translating and adapting training materials for different markets and languages, and creating personalized interactive dashboards for day-to-day work.

Deployment first, use cases later

Notably, Uber is scaling the tool before settling on exactly how employees should use it. "Our approach is to make powerful AI tools available across Uber while giving teams room to experiment," Sukumar said. Earlier this year the company also assembled what it called "AI pods" — 30 AI engineers paired with teams across the business and given two weeks to automate key parts of their jobs. Sukumar said the exercise showed how much opportunity emerges when technical expertise is combined with deep knowledge of a particular role.

Uber declined to disclose what the rollout costs. Instead, Sukumar said the company will study real usage: the workflows employees build and whether the tool helps them work more effectively. Those findings, he said, will guide how Uber deploys AI across the business going forward. TechCrunch reports that OpenAI collaborated closely with Uber on the integration.

A win in the enterprise AI race

The deal also carries weight for OpenAI. As TechCrunch notes, the company has moved quickly to expand its enterprise business as it competes primarily with Anthropic. Long perceived as a consumer brand on the strength of ChatGPT, OpenAI has won over business customers at speed while rivals have found it hard to match that pace. A workforce-wide contract with Uber hands it a high-profile reference customer in that contest.

Why it matters

A 30,000-seat deployment puts Uber among the biggest single-company rollouts of an AI agent product, making it a live test of whether broad, non-specialized access to these tools produces measurable returns. The makeup of Uber's pilot is telling: 80% of early users sat outside engineering, a signal that AI agents are shifting from developer utilities toward general workplace infrastructure.

Just as significant is what Uber does not yet know. The company is deploying first and measuring later, with no disclosed price tag and no fixed set of approved use cases. How its employees actually put ChatGPT Work to work — and what Uber learns from watching them — may reveal more about the near-term value of enterprise AI agents than any vendor pitch.