Andrew Macdonald is getting candid about Uber’s spending on AI.
Previously, Uber Chief Technology Officer, Praveen Neppalli, admitted the company had already reached its AI spending target in just four months, with Anthropic’s Claude Code playing a role, as it was used by around 5,000 of its engineers, according to Fortune. AI has enabled features such as ride pricing and route optimization for the rideshare company.
In an interview with the “Rapid Response and Masters of Scale” podcast, Uber President and Chief Operating Officer Andrew Macdonald questioned the company’s AI spending and acknowledged it’s becoming “harder to justify.”
“When you hear companies talking about, ‘Hey 25% of code commits over the last quarter were AI driven.” Or ‘Our token usage went from X to Y.’ You know all these sort of numbers, and it’s amazing. I think it’s this massive transformation of society, but then you sometimes go and you talk to your senior engineering leaders and you’re saying ‘Okay how many projects that were on the cutting room floor got moved above the line because of the productivity gains because 25% of our code commits were via cloud code last last quarter.’ That link is not there yet, right?”
“Our CTO Praveen went viral because he effectively said in an interview that we had blown through our AI budget for 2026, and it was the middle of March or something when he said this. Everyone was like … we’re going to have to start talking about you know token consumption and the associated cost versus headcount and making trades on that as an engineering organization. So if you’re not actually able to draw a direct line to how much you know useful features and functionality you’re shipping to your users that trade becomes harder to justify,” he added.
Macdonald added:
“If you’re just a user sitting there and coming up with interesting use cases and you don’t pay the bill, it can feel that way. But somebody’s paying the bill.”
