Uber cut 10% of the jobs in its customer service arm on Wednesday, tying the reductions directly to its wider push into artificial intelligence.

Key Points:

• Uber removed roughly 10% of roles in community operations, the unit that handles rider, driver and courier support.

• Remote employees on the affected team must now report to a hub office under the company return-to-office policy.

• The reduction is the second round of job cuts at the company in less than two months.

Uber Layoffs Hit Community Operations

Uber confirmed the changes on Wednesday, saying it wants to simplify operations, strengthen in-person collaboration and keep embracing AI.

The company declined to say how many workers were affected. It has never disclosed the size of its support organization, which fields complaints, onboarding questions and safety reports across more than 70 countries and roughly 202 million monthly users.

In an internal memo, Megha Yethatika, vice president of global community operations, noted that her team had already made progress with AI.

She described the wider organization as too complex and siloed, and said the fragmented structure made it hard to put newer AI tools to work at scale.

Remote workers in the affected unit were also told to relocate to a designated hub office, in line with the return-to-office mandate Uber applies elsewhere.

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Uber AI Layoffs Break A Corporate Taboo

The announcement marks the first time the company has publicly tied job losses to AI, a link most large employers still avoid making. Uber had already said that wider internal use of the technology would slow its hiring pace, but it stopped short of blaming AI for earlier cuts.

Tracker Layoffs.fyi counted 116,739 technology job losses worldwide so far this year, with roughly 28,900 of them recorded in May alone. Meta, Cisco, PayPal and Coinbase are among the employers that have trimmed staff. Uber is still recruiting, with more than 500 open roles listed, including engineering jobs tied to its robotaxi programs.

Uber AI Spending Preceded The Cuts

The appetite for AI has already proved expensive at Uber, and the bill arrived well before the layoffs.

The chief technology officer said in April that the company had burned through its annual AI budget in four months, and executives later capped spending on agentic coding tools at $1,500 per employee each month.

In June, Uber eliminated 23% of roles in its people division, a cut that touched well under 1% of its roughly 34,000 employees worldwide.

The company said at the time that AI was not the reason, describing the move instead as a leadership-driven reorganization. Chief Operating Officer Andrew Macdonald told a podcast in May that it remains hard to trace a line between AI usage and the consumer features the technology is meant to produce.

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