Andrew Macdonald, president and chief operating officer at Uber, has said that the lack of a clear correlation between productivity growth and AI token use is making the company’s huge spend on the technology “harder to justify”.
In an interview with the Rapid Response Podcast, Macdonald revealed that his engineering department was not currently seeing metrics that proved the value of the company’s decision to produce 10 per cent of its code using AI.
“That link is not there yet, right? I think maybe implicitly there is more that is getting shipped, but it’s very hard to draw a line between one of those stats and, ‘Okay, now we’re actually producing 25 per cent more useful consumer features,’” he said. “I think over the coming quarters and years, maybe that will become clearer, but I think today it’s hard, even if some of the underlying metrics are trending in a really astronomical direction.”
Uber’s chief technical officer announced in April that the company had already spent its entire 2026 technology budget. That same month, the company announced it was partnering with Amazon Web Services to improve its AI provision, helping to match drivers with riders, forecast demand and determine ride pricing.
However, such high spending comes with trade-offs, Macdonald notes. “We’re going to have to start talking about token consumption and the associated cost versus headcount and making trades on that,” he said. “If you’re not actually able to draw a direct line to how much [sic] useful features and functionality you’re shipping to your users, that trade becomes harder to justify.”
Macdonald’s comments contrast with those made by Uber’s chief executive’s in previous months.
At the beginning of May, Uber head Dara Khosrowshahi told investors in the company’s first quarter earnings call that the company had slowed hires to pay for increased AI usage. In February, he predicted that AI would replace 9.4 million jobs at his company in an interview on Steven Bartlett’s Diary of a CEO podcast.
