Uber’s head of operations has reignited the debate on AI spending, stating that the ride-hailing giant is finding it increasingly difficult to justify rising AI costs as gains in productivity and efficiency remain elusive.
Andrew Macdonald, the president and COO of Uber, said that he held talks with the company’s senior engineering leaders and realised that higher token usage of AI coding tools such as Anthropic’s Claude Code did not translate into a proportional increase in useful consumer features. A token is a unit of text processed by the AI model.
“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 percent more useful consumer features,’” Macdonald said in an appearance on the Rapid Response podcast released on Saturday, May 23.
“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,” the top Uber executive added.
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