Uber will deploy ChatGPT Work across its entire global workforce of roughly 30,000 people, expanding a partnership with OpenAI that began with a 1,000-employee pilot earlier this year1. The rollout was announced on Thursday.
ChatGPT Work launched in July as an enterprise-focused AI agent designed for corporate workflow automation. Uber's initial pilot spanned finance, operations, and product teams, with 80% of early adopters being non-engineers, according to Sumanth Sukumar, Uber's VP of engineering.
Pilot users applied the tool to data analysis for operational trends, localization of training materials across markets and languages, and construction of personalized dashboards for daily work management, Sukumar told TechCrunch. OpenAI worked closely with Uber on integrating the chatbot into the company's systems.
Uber has not locked in prescribed use cases for the broader rollout. Sukumar described the strategy as making AI tools available company-wide while giving teams room to experiment. In one internal initiative, Uber paired 30 AI engineers with teams across the company and gave them two weeks to automate key parts of their workflows.
Business Insider reported that the expansion follows layoffs at Uber last month2.
ANALYSIS The sequencing of a company-wide AI-agent deployment shortly after workforce reductions raises a natural question about whether automation is expected to absorb some of the capacity lost to those cuts, though neither Uber nor OpenAI addressed that link in the available reporting.
The deal adds to OpenAI's growing enterprise footprint. The company has separately committed resources to a UK government AI biosecurity initiative alongside Anthropic and Google DeepMind[1], and disclosed new safety protocols for frontier model training after a September 2026 incident[2].
ANALYSIS A 30,000-seat deployment weighted toward non-technical staff positions ChatGPT Work as a general productivity layer rather than a developer-only tool, a distinction that could shape how OpenAI prices and markets the product to other large enterprises.