haarith retweeted
Incredible to meet @gautam_adani and @jeet_adani1 at the Uber office today. @AdaniOnline is not just partners but a friend of @uber. Looking forward to what we can build together.
Great to host @gautam_adani, @jeet_adani1 from @AdaniOnline at @Uber. We’re partnered at 7 Adani airports, incl Navi Mumbai, that handle a quarter of India's air traffic. We talked about what’s next: AI, AVs + an even better airport experience for travelers across India, one of the world’s most exciting markets.
haarith retweeted

Balaji Krishnamurthy@_balaji_kmSep 24
United States
United StatesConnected via United States App StoreAccount-level information, not a live location or per-post device.
Replying to @motionaldrive
@motionaldrive has been flying under the radar, quietly preparing for a driverless launch on Uber in Las Vegas in Q4. I had the chance to spend half a day with the Motional team today, and took a driverless Motional for a spin through Vegas. Flawless ride - can't wait for everyone to experience it soon!
haarith retweeted
Since I previously shared how we are scaling AI usage so quickly without costs rising at the same rate, there’s been a lot of interest in the engineering details.
So I asked the team to open up the hood and share what we’ve learned.
One thing we’ve always been very good at @Uber is understanding the economics of a system at a deep level. And I’ve always believed that constraints drive innovation. We took the opportunity to turn the cost problem into an engineering problem. We broke AI spend down into its underlying levers and started systematically attacking each one:
• Scaling vendor-neutral managed agents
• Building Uber SWE benchmarks to measure what actually works
• Optimizing prompt caching
• Making tool and MCP usage more efficient
• Grounding trajectories in our context graph
• Building efficient, reusable agent skills
• Giving engineers real-time cost visibility and optimization tips
There’s a lot more work to do in this space: scaling more autonomous agents, dynamic model routing, a self-evolving context graph, and continuously updating efficient agent skills. There's still a tremendous amount to invent here, and we’ll keep sharing what we learn as we build and deploy it at Uber.
This is an incredible time to be an engineer. The economics of software are changing, the way we build is changing, and engineers have an opportunity to help define what comes next.
Read the deep dive here: uber.com/us/en/blog/efficien… and let us know what you think.
Just in time for back-to-school! We’re rolling out live video streaming for teen rides, a new feature that gives parents a way to check in on their teen’s trip in real time.
abcnews.com/GMA/Family/uber-…
haarith retweeted
Love this new feature - live video streaming for @Uber Teen accounts is rolling out nationwide – giving parents more visibility while their teens are on the go and right in time for school. Proud of our tech teams for making this happen - abcnews.com/GMA/Family/uber-…
haarith retweeted
Uber has a long history of investing in Nevada, and we’re continuing to double down on the state. The next chapter is taking shape with @Motionaldrive and @Zoox as we prepare to launch fully autonomous vehicles in Las Vegas
Big news for those who follow the evolving regulatory landscape for AVs (isn’t that everyone?): The Nevada Transportation Authority has approved Uber’s application to operate as an Autonomous Vehicle Network Company (AVNC), marking an important milestone for autonomous mobility in Nevada – and for our vision of a hybrid network where AVs and drivers operate side by side on the Uber platform.
As we prepare to launch fully autonomous rides with @Zoox and @MotionalDrive in Las Vegas, we’ll continue working closely with the State of Nevada and local officials every step of the way. Should be an exciting second half of 2026!
haarith retweeted
So great to finally sit down in London with @HarryStebbings - we covered a lot of ground!
I have interviewed 1,000 of the best operators of the last 10 years.
Ironically, one of the best I have ever interviewed isn’t actually a Founder.
He is the longest serving employee at @Uber.
Andrew MacDonald.
He rarely does interviews and this was the most insane behind the scenes at one of the worlds largest companies:
- Spending $52M per week in China
- Lessons from Travis Kalanick
- Why autonomy is existential
- How AI helps and hurts Uber
There was so much in this, I took notes and have added them below:
1. How Does Uber Decide What New Products to Do Versus Not Do?
At nearly $250 billion in gross bookings, new mobility or delivery products must show a credible path to billions in transaction volume within a few years to justify organizational resources. Anything smaller risks being swallowed by the demands of the core business.
2. How Companies Need to Extract AI Efficiency
Measuring AI ROI on a per-employee basis is nearly impossible because saved hours simply get absorbed by other work. Instead, leaders should capture efficiency through OpEx by capping or reducing headcount targets and requiring teams to produce more with existing resources.
3. Uber Have a SWAT Team of the Best AI Engineers
Uber created a dedicated pod of 30 elite AI engineers paired directly with G&A teams and business process owners. By rebuilding workflows from the ground up, they cut weekly pricing processes from 15 hours to two and marketing QA from two weeks to two days.
4. Why We Were Right to Focus on Core Strategy and Divest the Autonomy Business at the Time
When COVID erased 84% of Uber’s mobility revenue in three weeks, the company divested its ATG autonomous driving unit. Exiting a capital-intensive race where Uber trailed competitors freed the company to focus on turning its core marketplace into a cash-flowing machine.
5. Will Uber Have More or Fewer Employees in Five Years’ Time?
While AI will create entirely new industries, execution-heavy enterprise functions will see significant headcount contraction. Roles centered on customer support, sales ops, content production, and reporting analytics will face substantial augmentation and partial replacement by AI agents.
6. Crazy Story Number One From Working in China
At the peak of its market-share war with DiDi in China, Uber burned $52 million per week on price subsidies alone. Competing without access to WeChat made winning nearly impossible, but aggressive capital deployment gave Uber the leverage needed to negotiate a successful local exit.
7. Single Biggest Lesson From Travis Kalanick
Travis Kalanick’s operational superpower was walking into a meeting, asking pointed questions, and advancing weeks of expert thinking in 15 minutes. Great leaders create leverage by constantly exercising this problem-solving muscle and teaching the principles behind their decisions.
(links in comments)
@andrewgordonmac
haarith retweeted
I've known and admired @Keller for what he's built for years - his product has been battle-tested in the most challenging of circumstances. Drone delivery @UberEats promises to take what has been a delightful experience to truly magical again. Now is the time to scale (production, network, unit costs) - something we're pretty good at 💪!!
Uber, Zipline Partner With Goal of Hitting 1 Million Drone Deliveries a Day on.wsj.com/45wF37a
haarith retweeted
“From individual launches to repeatable commercial scale” 👏
We’re expanding our partnership with @Uber , with plans to deploy more than 2,000 Pony.ai Robotaxis across Europe.
Building on the commercial service in Zagreb, the partnership targets four additional European cities—taking our joint-deployment model toward repeatable commercial scale.
More: blog.pony.ai/pony-ai-and-ube…
haarith retweeted
We’re expanding our partnership with @Uber , with plans to deploy more than 2,000 Pony.ai Robotaxis across Europe.
Building on the commercial service in Zagreb, the partnership targets four additional European cities—taking our joint-deployment model toward repeatable commercial scale.
More: blog.pony.ai/pony-ai-and-ube…
haarith retweeted
It was great to visit our @Uber AV Labs team with @sachinkansal and see firsthand the progress we’re making to accelerate the entire AV ecosystem.
We launched AV Labs earlier this year with a simple goal: to build the world’s most geographically diverse, high-quality dataset for autonomous driving and make it available to our growing network of 30+ AV partners.
Working with @ROUSHPerf, we’re equipping a fleet of vehicles with 14 cameras, 8 solid-state lidars, and 9 radars. These sensors capture a 360 degree, time-synchronized view that can help our AV partners train and improve their self-driving tech across a wide range of real-world environments and conditions.
This year, we plan to deploy up to 500 of our data collect vehicles globally, with the first hitting the road this summer. These vehicles will collect data while completing real trips on the Uber platform with Uber drivers, helping us capture the complexity of real-world driving at scale. By combining the scale of our platform with the expertise of our partners, we can accelerate progress across the entire AV ecosystem.
Proud of the team making this vision a reality! @UberEng
haarith retweeted

Balaji Krishnamurthy@_balaji_kmAug 6
United States
United StatesConnected via United States App StoreAccount-level information, not a live location or per-post device.
Replying to @TheRideshareGuy
.@TheRideshareGuy One of the reasons why Uber is so successful is because we obsessively measure our performance across multiple metrics. Category Position is at the top of that list - i.e. how we are faring vs competitors in a certain city or country, which we track on a weekly basis.
We use lots of different third party sources like anonymized credit card and email panels, as well as public reporting, and we obviously know our own performance with high fidelity.
So when we make a public statement about our category position, we have high confidence in the data. We hold an even higher bar for disclosures we make on our earnings calls.
By the way, here's an updated view from Yipit that should confirm this statement as well.
haarith retweeted
As our CFO @_balaji_km mentioned at earnings today, we’re seeing some very interesting trends on AI costs. I think it’s another signal that we’re coming to the end of the so-called ‘tokenmaxxing’ era.
Here’s what’s been happening behind the scenes.
Since the beginning of the year we’ve more than quadrupled the number of people using frontier AI tools. That’s thousands of engineers using them every single day. During that same period, our cost per token has declined.
You might expect costs to rise as adoption accelerates. We've seen the opposite. Not because we've restricted access, but because we've treated efficiency as an engineering problem rather than a budget problem. A few examples:
• Caching and reuse: We use optimizations to improve our prompt cache hit rate that reduce our input token spend.
• Better defaults and tooling: We tuned default model settings, context sizes and developer workflows so teams get the same results with fewer tokens and lower-cost inference.
• Visibility drives efficiency: We gave engineers real-time visibility into their AI usage and costs per hour.
• Experimenting with open-weight models: we continuously evaluate new models and deploy the best option for each use case.
This is the future of applied AI at enterprise scale. The next phase, whatever we call it, will not be characterized by who spends the most tokens, but about how people use them as efficiently as possible.
Credit to all the engineers at @Uber who are helping to build this future. 🚀
haarith retweeted
Agentic AI adoption is on fire at @Uber, and it's changing the way we build, not just in engineering, but across the entire company.
Today, 99% of our engineers use AI tools. More than 70% of pull requests are attributed to local or cloud agents. And our engineers have built 2,500+ agent skills across the software development lifecycle.
Those numbers are exciting, but they led us to a much bigger question:
How do we bring agentic AI beyond engineering?
Finance. Legal. Operations. Marketing. Customer Support. HR. Procurement.
These functions run on complex workflows that are often manual, highly nuanced, and spread across dozens of systems. You can't automate them effectively by looking at process diagrams or documentation. You have to understand how the work actually gets done.
So we created something called Agentic Pods.
The idea is simple.
We handpicked ~30 of our most AI-proficient engineers (people with deep knowledge of Uber's systems) and paired each of them with a domain expert from a business function.
Then we gave every pod just two weeks.
• Days 1 – 2: Shadow the expert. Observe every step. Document workflows. Ask questions. Build intuition.
• Day 3: Prioritize opportunities based on scale, repetition, business impact, and data availability.
• Days 4 – 5: Build a working agent alongside the person doing the job.
• Days 6 – 9: Validate with several others performing the same work. Does it generalize? Does it actually make their job better?
• Day 10: Ship.
In just the past two months, we've run 16 Agentic Pods across 16 different business functions.
• Capital allocation across 150 cities: 15 hours → 30 minutes.
• Financial pacing reports: 2 days → 10 minutes.
• Marketing web quality assurance: 2 weeks → 50 minutes.
• Support workflow creation: 9,000 manual workflows → self-service automation.
The productivity gains are impressive, but what surprised us most wasn't the speed.
• It was how quickly engineers embedded in unfamiliar domains uncovered opportunities that had been hiding in plain sight.
• The biggest wins rarely come from automating one task. They come from rethinking an entire workflow. Once you redesign the workflow around AI, you often eliminate handoffs, remove unnecessary approvals, replace legacy tooling, reduce vendor spend, and dramatically accelerate decision-making.
• The workflow becomes the unit of automation - not the individual task.
• The most impactful agent skills cut across teams, orgs, functions, tools, and systems.
The biggest lesson? The best AI opportunities are rarely visible from the outside.
You discover them by sitting next to the people doing the work, understanding every friction point, and building with them, not for them.
We're now forming a dedicated team to scale this further and go deeper. They'll deeply understand the work, redesign it from the ground up, and use AI to fundamentally change how the business operates.
It's exciting times!
haarith retweeted
Traffic alert! Southbound 680 at the 580 interchange, expect major delays with flooding.

























