Uber lays off 10% of customer service workers and calls others back to working in the office, citing AI

Uber is cutting customer service roles — and it says artificial intelligence is the reason.

The ride-hailing company is laying off about 10% of its community operations team and asking remote employees to relocate to a city with an Uber office and work there three days a week, it said in a statement on Thursday.

Bloomberg earlier reported the news.

AI presents “a massive opportunity for us to accelerate output, improve quality, and scale customer solutions at pace,” Megha Yethadka, Uber’s vice president of global community operations, wrote in a memo to the team on Wednesday. “We’ve made some strides, but to unlock this potential, we need an effective organization to layer AI on,” Yethadka wrote. “We cannot scale frontier technology on top of fragmented processes.” An Uber spokesperson said the company informed the team on Wednesday about the “structural changes we are making to simplify operations, strengthen in-person collaboration, and continue to embrace AI.” The layoffs add Uber to the list of companies that have cut jobs in the name of AI.

Others this year include Block, IBM, and Snap.

Last month, Uber laid off a quarter of its human resources and recruitment staff.

The cuts affected less than 1% of the company’s 34,000-person global workforce and weren’t connected to AI, Uber said at the time.

CEO Dara Khosrowshahi has said that Uber is slowing down hiring as it invests more in AI.

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