Uber handed 30,000 employees to an OpenAI agent that reads their Gmail

Uber and OpenAI announced a partnership expansion Thursday: Uber's entire global workforce — about 30,000 people — will now use ChatGPT Work, OpenAI's enterprise agent for everyday workflows. The company-wide rollout scales a 1,000-employee pilot from earlier this year up thirtyfold.

Uber VP of engineering Sumanth Sukumar told TechCrunch that around 80% of the pilot users were non-engineers in finance, operations and product; they used the agent to analyze operations data, localize training materials across markets, and build interactive dashboards. Earlier this year Uber also paired 30 AI engineers with teams for two-week 'AI pods' to automate key parts of people's jobs.

Uber won't say what the rollout costs — it plans to watch how employees use the tool and let the outcomes guide future AI spending. The timing is OpenAI's playbook: the ChatGPT creator is racing to scale its enterprise business against Anthropic, and a 30,000-seat company-wide deployment is one of the largest agentic rollouts yet.